Chapter IV: Part 4

In true tragedy, every circumstance assumes another character and another aspect; no incident is isolated, or alien to the very substance of the drama; no link is slight or fortuitous. The events grouped around the principal personage present themselves to view with the importance which they derive from the impression that he receives of them; to him they address themselves, and from him they proceed; he is the beginning and the end, the instrument and the object of the decrees of God, who, in the world which He has created for man, wills that every thing should be done by the hands of man, and nothing according to his designs. God employs the human will to accomplish intentions which man never entertained, and allows him to proceed freely toward a goal which he has not selected. But though man is exposed to the influence of events, he does not fall into subjection to them; if impotence be his condition, liberty is his nature; the feelings, ideas, and wishes with which he is inspired by external objects emanate from himself alone; in him resides an independent and spontaneous power which rejects and defies the empire to which his destiny is subjected. Thus was the world constituted, and thus has Shakspeare conceived tragedy. Give him an obscure and remote event; let him be bound to conduct it toward a determinate result, through a series of incidents more or less known; amid these facts he will place a passion or a character, and put all the threads of the action into the hands of the creature of his own origination. Events follow their course, and man enters upon his; he employs his power to divert them from the direction which he does not wish them to pursue, to conquer them when they thwart him, and to elude them when they embarrass him; he subjects them for a moment to his authority, to find them soon acting with greater hostility toward him in the new course which he has forced them to take; and at last he succumbs entirely in the struggle in which his destiny and his life have gone to wreck.

{95}

The power of man in conflict with the power of fate--this is the spectacle which fascinated and inspired the dramatic genius of Shakspeare. Perceiving it for the first time in the catastrophe of "Romeo and Juliet," he felt his will suddenly terror-struck at the aspect of the vast disproportion which exists between the efforts of man and the inflexibility of destiny--between the immensity of our desires and the nullity of our means. In "Hamlet," the second of his tragedies, he reproduces this picture with a sort of shuddering dread. A feeling of duty has prescribed to Hamlet a terrible project; he does not think that any thing can permit him to evade it; and from the very outset, he sacrifices every thing to it--his love, his self-respect, his pleasures, and even the studies of his youth. He has now only one object in the world--to prove and punish the crime which had caused his father's death. That, in order to accomplish this design, he must break the heart of her he loves; that, during the course of the incidents which he originates in order to effect his purpose, a mistake renders him the murderer of the inoffensive Polonius; that he himself becomes an object of mirth and contempt--he cares not, does not even bestow a thought upon it; these are the natural results of his determination, and in this determination his whole existence is concentrated. But he is desirous to accomplish his plan with certainty; he wishes to feel assured that the blow will be legitimate, and that it will not fail to strike home. Henceforward accumulate in his path those doubts, difficulties, and obstacles which the course of things invariably sets in opposition to the man who aims at subjecting it to his will. By bestowing a less philosophical observation upon these impediments, Hamlet would surmount them more easily; but the hesitation and dread which they inspire form part of their power, and Hamlet must undergo its entire influence. {96} Nothing, however, can shake his resolution, nothing divert him from his purpose: he advances, slowly it is true, with his eyes constantly fixed upon his object; whether he originates an opportunity, or merely appropriates one already existing, every step is a progress, until he seems to border on the final term of his design. But time has had its career; Providence is at its limit; the events which Hamlet has prepared hasten onward without his co-operation; they are consummated by him, and to his own destruction; and he falls a victim to those decrees whose accomplishment he has insured, destined to show how little man can avail to effect, even in that which he most ardently desires.

Already more inured to the contemplation of human life, Richard III., at the commencement of his sanguinary career, contemplates, with steady gaze, that immense disproportion before which the thought of the courageous but inexperienced Hamlet had incessantly quailed. Richard merely promises himself greater pride and pleasure from the subjugation of this hostile power; and resolves to give the lie to fate, which appeared to have destined him to abasement and contempt. In fact, we behold him ruling, like a conqueror, the chances of his life; events spring from his hands bearing the impress of his will; just as his thought conceives them, his power accomplishes them; he completes what he has projected, raises his existence to a level with his ambition, and falls at the moment appointed by inflexible destiny, to render the punishment of his crimes more striking, by inflicting it in the midst of his successes. Macbeth, Othello, Coriolanus, all equally active and blind in the conduct of their destiny, bring down upon themselves, in the same manner, with all the force of a passionate will, the event which is fated to crush them.

{97}

Brutus dies in consequence of the death of Caesar; no one desired more than himself the blow which killed him; no one resolved on his death by a freer choice of his reason; he had not, like Hamlet, a ghost to dictate to him his duty; in himself alone he found that severe law to which he sacrificed his repose, his affections, and his inclinations; no one is more thoroughly master of himself; and yet, like all the rest, he dies, powerless to resist fate. With him perishes the liberty which he aspired to save; the hope of rendering his death useful does not even flash across his mind; and yet Shakspeare does not make him exclaim, when dying, "Virtue, thou art only an empty name!" And why not? Because above this terrible conflict of man against necessity soars his moral existence, independent and sovereign, free from all the perils of the combat. The mighty genius whose view had embraced the whole destiny of man could not have failed to recognize its sublime secret; a sure instinct revealed to him this final explanation, without which all is darkness and uncertainty. Furnished, therefore, with the moral thread which never breaks in his hands, he proceeds with firm steps through the embarrassments of circumstances and the perplexities of varied feelings; nothing can be simpler at bottom than Shakspeare's action; nothing less complicated than the impression which it leaves upon our minds. Our interest is never divided, and still less does it waver between two opposite inclinations, or two equally powerful affections. As soon as the characters become known, and their position is developed, our choice is made; we know what we desire and what we fear, whom we hate and whom we love. There is also as little conflict of duties as of interests; and the conscience wavers no more than the affections. {98} In the midst of political revolutions, in times when society is at war with itself, and can no longer guide individuals by those laws which it has imposed upon them for the maintenance of its unity, then alone does Shakspeare's judgment hesitate, and allow ours to hesitate also; he can himself no longer accurately determine on which side lies the right, or what duty requires, and he is therefore unable to tell us. "King John," "Richard II.," and the three parts of "Henry VI.," furnish examples of this. In every other drama, the moral position is evident, free from ambiguity, and undisguised by complaisance; the characters are not represented as deceiving or deceived, hovering between vice and virtue, weakness and crime; what they are, they are frankly and openly; their actions are depicted in vigorous outlines, so that even the weakest eyesight can not mistake them. And yet--so admirable is his perception of truths--in these actions, so positive, complete, and consistent, all the inconsistencies and fantastic mixtures of human nature exist and are displayed. Macbeth has fully made up his mind to crime; no link binds his conduct any longer to virtue; and yet who can doubt that, in the character of Macbeth, side by side with the passions which stimulate him to crime, there still exist those inclinations which constitute virtue? The mother of Hamlet has set no bounds to her incestuous love; she knows her crime and boldly commits it; her position is that of a shameless culprit; but her soul is that of a woman capable of loving modesty, and finding happiness within the bounds of duty. Even Claudius himself, the wretch Claudius, would wish to be able still to pray; he can not do so, but he wishes he could. Thus the keen vision of the philosopher enlightens and directs the imagination of the poet; thus man appears to Shakspeare only when fully furnished with all that belongs to his nature. The truth is always there, before the eyes of the poet: he looks down and writes.

{99}

But there is one truth which Shakspeare does not observe in this manner, which he derives from himself, and without which all the external truths which he contemplates would be merely cold and sterile images; and that is, the feeling which these truths excite within him. This feeling is the mysterious bond which unites us to the outer world, and makes us truly know it; when our mind has taken realities into consideration, our soul is moved by an analogous and spontaneous impression; but for the anger with which we are inspired by the sight of crime, whence should we obtain the revelation of that element which renders crime odious? No one has ever combined, in an equal degree with Shakspeare, this double character of an impartial observer and a man of profound sensibility. Superior to all by his reason, and accessible to all by sympathy, he sees nothing without judging it, and he judges it because he feels it. Could any one who did not detest Iago have penetrated, as Shakspeare has done, into the recesses of his execrable character? To the horror with which he regards the criminal must be ascribed the terrible energy of the language which he puts into his mouth. Who could make us tremble, so much as Lady Macbeth herself, at the action for which she prepares with so little fear? But when it becomes needful to express pity or tenderness, the unrestraint of love, the extravagance of maternal apprehension, or the stern and deep grief of manly affection--then the observer may quit his post, and the judge his tribunal. Shakspeare himself develops all the abundance of his nature, and gives expression to those familiar feelings of his soul which are set in motion by the slightest contact with his imagination. {100} Women, children, old men--who has described them with such truthfulness as he? Where the ingenuousness of requited affection given birth to a purer flower than Desdemona? Has old age, when shamefully deserted, and driven to madness by the weakness of senility and the violence of grief, ever given utterance to more pathetic lamentations than in "King Lear?" Who has not felt his heart assailed by all the emotions of anguish which childhood can inspire, on beholding the scene in which Hubert, in performance of his promise to King John, is about to burn out the eyes of young Arthur? And if this barbarous project were carried into execution, who could endure it? But in such a case Shakspeare would not have described the scene. There is an excess of grief in presence of which he pauses; he takes pity on himself, and repels impressions too powerful to be borne. Scarcely does he permit Juliet to utter any words between Romeo's death and her own; Macduff is silent after the massacre of his wife and children; and Constance dies before we are allowed to behold the death of Arthur. Othello alone approaches the whole of his sufferings without mitigation; but his misfortune was so horrible, when he was ignorant of it, that the impression which he receives from it, after the discovery of his error, becomes almost a consolation.

Thus moved by all that moves us, Shakspeare obtains our confidence; we yield ourselves in security to that open soul in which our feelings have already reverberated, and to that ready imagination which is as much illumined by the splendid sun of Italy as darkened by the sombre fogs of Denmark. Dramatic in the portraiture of a mother's gambols with her child, and simple in the terrible apparition which opens the first scene of "Hamlet," the poet is never unequal to the realities which ho has to delineate, or the man to the emotions with which he wishes to imbue our hearts.

{101}

Why, then, are we sometimes painfully compelled to pause while following him? Why does a sort of impatience and fatigue frequently disturb the admiration which we feel for his works? One misfortune happened to Shakspeare; though he was always lavish of his wealth, he was not always able to distribute it either opportunely or skillfully. This was frequently the misfortune of Corneille also. Ideas accumulated about Corneille, as about Shakspeare, confusedly and tumultuously, and neither of them had the courage to treat his own mind with prudent severity. They forgot the position of the character they were describing, in order to indulge in the thoughts which it awakened in the soul of the poet. In Shakspeare, especially, this excessive indulgence in his own ideas and feelings sometimes arrests and interrupts the emotions awakened in the breast of the spectator, in a manner which is fatal to the dramatic effect. It is not merely, as in Corneille, the ingenious loquacity of a rather talkative mind; but it is the restless and fantastic reverie of a mind astonished at its own discoveries, not knowing how to reproduce the whole impression which it has received from them, and heaping ideas, images, and expressions one upon another, in order to awaken in us feelings similar to those by which it is itself oppressed. The feelings developed at such length are not always, however, those which should properly occupy the personage by whom they are expressed; and not only is the harmony of the position injured by them, but we find ourselves compelled to undertake a certain labor which, in the end, diverts our attention from the subject on which it ought to be concentrated. {102} Though always simple in their emotions, the heroes of Shakspeare are not always equally simple in their speeches; though always true and natural in their ideas, they are not as constantly true and natural in the combinations which they form from them. The poet's gaze embraced an immense field, and his imagination, traversing it with marvelous rapidity, perceived a thousand distant or singular relations between the objects which met his view, and passed from one to another by a multitude of abrupt and curious transitions, which it afterward imposed upon both the personages of the drama and the spectators. Hence arose the true and great fault of Shakspeare, the only one that originated in himself, and which is sometimes perceptible even in his finest compositions; and that is, a deceptive appearance of laborious research, which is occasioned, on the contrary, by the absence of labor. Accustomed, by the taste of his age, frequently to connect ideas and expressions by their most distant relations, he contracted the habit of that learned subtlety which perceives and assimilates every thing, and leaves no point of resemblance unnoticed; and this fault has more than once marred the gayety of his comedies, as well as destroyed the pathos of his tragedies. If meditation had taught Shakspeare to fall back upon himself, to contemplate his own strength, and to concentrate it by skillful management, he would soon have rejected the abuse which he has made of it, and would have speedily become conscious that neither his heroes nor his spectators could follow him in that prodigious movement of ideas, feelings, and intentions which, on every occasion, and under the slightest pretext, arose and obtruded themselves upon his own thought.

{103}

But so far as we are able, at the present day, to form any idea of Shakspeare's character, from the scattered and uncertain details which have reached us regarding his life and person, we have every reason to believe that he never bestowed so much care either on his labors or on his glory. More disposed to enjoy his own powers than to turn them to their best account--docile to the inspiration, rather than guided by the consciousness of his genius--vexed but little by a craving after success, and more inclined to doubt its value than attentive to the means of obtaining it--the poet advanced without measuring his progress, unvailing himself, as it were, at every step, and perhaps retaining, even at the end of his career, some remains of ingenuous ignorance of the marvelous riches which he scattered so lavishly in every direction. His sonnets alone, of all his works, contain a few allusions to his personal feelings, and to the condition of his soul and life; but we rarely meet in them with the idea, so natural to a poet, of the immortality which his works are destined to achieve. He could not have been a man who reckoned much upon posterity, or who cared at all about it, who ever displayed so little anxiety to throw light upon the only monuments of his private existence which posterity possesses concerning him.

Printed for the first time in 1609, these sonnets were, doubtless, published with Shakspeare's consent, although nothing seems to indicate that he took the slightest part in their publication. Neither his publisher nor himself has endeavored to impart to them an historical interest by naming the persons to whom they were addressed, or the occasions which inspired their composition. Thus the light which they throw upon some of the circumstances of his life is often so doubtful that it tends rather to perplex than to guide the biographer. The passionate style which pervades them all--even those which are evidently addressed merely to a friend--has thrown the commentators upon Shakspeare into great embarrassment. {104} Of all the conjectures which have been hazarded in explanation of this fact, one alone, in my opinion, seems to possess any likelihood. At a time when the mind, tormented, as it were, by its youth and inexperience, tried all forms of expression, except simplicity--and at a court in which _euphuism_, the fashionable language, had introduced the most whimsical travesties, both of persons and ideas, into familiar conversation--it is possible that, in order to express real feelings, the poet may sometimes have assumed, in these fugitive compositions, the tone and language of conventionality. It is known, from a pamphlet published in 1598, that Shakspeare's "sugar'd sonnets," which were already celebrated, although they had not yet been printed, were the delight of his private circle of friends; and if it be remarked that the idea which terminates them is almost always repeated, with variations, in several successive sonnets, we shall feel strongly tempted to regard them as the simple amusements of a mind which could never resist the opportunity of expressing an ingenious idea. Not only, therefore, are Shakspeare's sonnets insufficient to explain the facts to which they allude, but it is only by a more or less logical process of induction that they can be made to supply any details regarding the occupations of Shakspeare's life during his residence in London, and during those thirty years, now so glorious, regarding which he has been at such pains to supply us with no information.

Perhaps his position, as well as his character, may have contributed to cause this silence. A feeling of pride, as much as a sentiment of modesty, may have induced Shakspeare to leave in oblivion an existence which gave him but little satisfaction. The condition of an actor then possessed, in England, neither consistency nor reputation. Whatever difference Hamlet may place between strolling players and those who belonged to an established theatre, the latter could not but bear the weight of the coarseness of the public upon whom they were dependent, as well as that of the colleagues with whom they shared the task of diverting the public.

{105}

The general fondness for theatrical amusements furnished employment to persons of every condition, from those who engaged in bear-baitings, to the choristers of St. Paul's and the players of Blackfriars. It was probably of some theatre holding a middle rank between these two extremes that Shakspeare gives us so amusing a description in the "Midsummer Night's Dream." But the means of illusion to which the artisan performers of this drama have recourse, are in no respect inferior to those of which the most distinguished theatres made use. The actor, covered "with lime and rough-cast," who represents the wall that separated Pyramus and Thisbe, and moves his fingers to provide "the chink through which the lovers whisper," and the man who, with his lantern, his dog, and his thorn-bush, "doth the horned moon present," did not require a much greater stretch of the imagination of the spectators than was necessary to regard the same scene as a garden full of flowers; then, without any changes, as a rock upon which a vessel has just suffered shipwreck; and, finally, as a field of battle, upon which "two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers." [Footnote 17] There is reason to believe that all these performances collected together very nearly the same audience; at least, it is certain that Shakspeare's plays were performed both at Blackfriars and at the Globe, two different theatres, although both belonged to the same troop.

[Footnote 17: See the ironical description of the uncouth
state of the stage, given by Sir Philip Sidney in his
"Defense of Poesy."]

{106}

Strolling players were accustomed to give their performances in the court-yards of inns. The stage was erected in one corner, while the spectators occupied the remainder of the yard, standing, like the actors, in the open air; the lower rooms and the gallery which ran round the court, were doubtless opened to the public at a higher rate of admission. The London theatres were constructed upon this plan; and those which were called "public playhouses," in opposition to the "private theatres," kept up the custom of performing in the open air, without any other canopy than the sky. The Globe was a public theatre, and the Blackfriars a private one; these last establishments doubtless occupied a superior rank; and, at a later period, to frequent the Blackfriars theatre was regarded as a mark of elegant taste and superior discernment. But such distinctions are incapable of being clearly defined, and when Shakspeare appeared on the stage these shades of difference were probably very confused. In 1609, Decker wrote a pamphlet entitled "The Gul's Horne-booke," which contains a chapter, "How a gallant should behave himself in a play-house." We learn from this authority that a gentleman, on entering a public or private theatre, should walk at once on the stage, and sit down either on the ground or on a stool, as he found it convenient to pay for a seat or not. He must valiantly keep his post, in spite of the gibes and insults of the populace in the pit; because it becomes a gentleman to laugh at "the mews and hisses of the opposed rascality." However, if the multitude should begin to shout "Out with the fool!" the danger becomes sufficiently serious for good taste to permit the gentleman to withdraw. During the performance, the common people were supplied with beer and apples, of which the actors also frequently partook; while the gentlemen, on their side, smoked their pipes and played at cards; indeed, it was not at all unusual for the elegant _habitues_ of the theatre to begin a game at cards before the commencement of the play. {107} "The Gul's Horne-booke" recommends them to play with an appearance of great eagerness, even if they return the money to each other at supper-time; and nothing, says Decker, can give greater notoriety to a gentleman than to throw his cards on the stage, after having torn up three or four of them with every manifestation of rage. The duties of the spectators in possession of the honors of the stage were to speak, to laugh, and to turn their backs on the actors whenever they were displeased with either the author or the play. These pleasures of the gentlemen give a sufficient clue to those of the populace in the pit, whom contemporary writers usually designate by the name of "stinkards." The condition of the actors compelled to minister to the amusement of such an audience could not but be attended by more than one unpleasantness, and we may attribute to Shakspeare's experience of an actor's life that aversion for popular assemblies which is frequently displayed with great energy in his works.

Nor do the condition and habits of the poets who wrote for the stage give us a more honorable idea, in these two respects, of the actors with whom they associated; and, in order to suppose that Shakspeare, young, gay, and easy-tempered, could have escaped from the influence of his two-fold character of poet and actor, we need the assistance of that unshrinking faith which the commentators repose in their patron. Shakspeare himself leaves us little room to doubt that he fell into errors, which he at least has the merit of regretting. {108} In one of his sonnets, he inquires why Fortune, whom he calls

"The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,"

should alone bear the reproach of the "public means" to which he has been obliged to resort for his subsistence. And he adds:

"Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.
Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed,
While, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eysel [Footnote 18] 'gainst my strong infection;
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
Nor double penance to correct correction."

[Footnote 18: Vinegar.]

In the next sonnet, addressing the same person, still in the same tone of confident yet respectful affection, he says:

"Your love and pity doth th' impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow;
For what care I who calls me well or ill,
So you o'er-green my bad, my good allow?"

In another sonnet, he laments over the blot which had divided two lives united by affection, and says:

"I may not evermore acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame;
Nor thou with public kindness honor me,
Unless thou take that honor from my name."

And in another sonnet, he complains that he is, if not calumniated, at least wrongly judged; and that the "frailties of his sportive blood" are spied out by censors, who are frailer than himself. It is easy to divine the nature of Shakspeare's frailties; and several sonnets on the infidelities, and even on the vices, of the mistress whom he celebrates, give sufficient proof that his errors were not always caused by persons capable of excusing them. However, how can we suppose that, in the state of morals in the sixteenth century, public severity could have looked with great rigor on such disorders? {109} In order to explain the humiliation of the poet, we must suppose either that he had been guilty of some extraordinarily scandalous conduct, or that particular dishonor attached to the disorders and position of an actor. The latter hypothesis appears to me the most probable. No grave reproach can, at any time, have weighed upon a man whose contemporaries never speak of him without affection and esteem, and whom Ben Jonson declares to have been "truly honest," without deriving from this assertion either the opportunity or the right of relating some circumstance disgraceful to his memory, or some well-known error which the officious rival would not have failed to establish while excusing it.

Perhaps, on being brought into contact with the higher classes of society, struck by the display of a relative elegance of sentiments and manners of which he had previously had no idea, and becoming suddenly aware that his nature gave him a right to participate in these delicacies which had hitherto been foreign to his habits, Shakspeare felt himself oppressed, by his position, with painful shackles; perhaps even he was led to exaggerate his humiliation, by the natural disposition of a haughty soul, which feels itself all the more abased by an unequal condition, because it is conscious of its worthiness to enjoy equality. At all events, there can be no doubt that, with that measured circumspection which is as frequently the accompaniment of pride as of modesty, Shakspeare labored to overleap these humiliating differences of station, and succeeded in his attempt. His first dedication to Lord Southampton, that of "Venus and Adonis," is written with respectful timidity. {110} That of the poem of "Lucrece," which was published in the following year, expresses grateful attachment, which feels sure of being well received; and he vows to his protector "love without end." The resemblance of the tone of this preface to that of a great many of the sonnets, the repeated benefits in which the friendship of Lord Southampton enabled their recipient to glory, and the lively affection with which the sensitive and confident Shakspeare was naturally inspired by the amiable and generous protection of a young man of such brilliant rank and merit--all these circumstances have led some of the commentators to suppose that Lord Southampton may have been the object of the poet's inexplicable sonnets. Without inquiring to what extent the _euphuism_ then prevalent, the exaggeration of poetic language, and the false taste of the age, may have imparted to Lord Southampton the features of an adored mistress, we can not but admit that most of these sonnets are addressed to a person of superior rank, the devotion of the poet to whom bears the character of submissive but passionate respect. Several of them, also, seem to point to habitual and intimate literary connections. Sometimes Shakspeare congratulates himself on possessing the guidance and inspiration of his friend; and sometimes he complains that he has ceased to be the sole recipient of that inspiration, and says,

"I grant thou wert not married to my Muse;"

but yet the grief occasioned by this divided favor is expressed under all the forms of jealousy, sometimes resigned to its fate, and sometimes stimulated, by the bitterness of its feelings, to give utterance to strong reproaches, which, however, never transgress the bounds of respect. {111} Elsewhere he accuses himself, as it would appear, of infidelity to "an old friend;" he has too "frequent been with unknown minds," and "given to time" the "dear-purchased rights" of an affection

"Whereto all bonds do tie me day by day;"

but he confesses his fault; and implores pardon in the name of the confidence with which he is always inspired by the affection he has neglected. Another sonnet speaks of mutual wrongs pardoned, but the sorrow of which is still present. If these are not mere forms of language, employed, perhaps, on occasions very different from those which they appear to indicate, the feeling which thus occupied the inner life of the poet must have been as tempestuous as it was passionate.

Externally, however, his existence seems to have pursued a tranquil course. His name is mixed up in no literary quarrel; and, but for the malicious allusions of the envious Ben Jonson, scarcely would a single criticism be associated with the panegyrics which bear witness to his superiority. All the documents which we possess exhibit Shakspeare to us placed at last in the position which he was rightfully entitled to occupy, and valued as much for the charm of his character as for the brilliancy of his talents, and the admiration due to his genius. A glance, too, at the affairs of the poet will prove that he was beginning to introduce into the details of his existence that order and regularity which are essential to respectability. We find him successively purchasing, in his native town, a house and various portions of land, which soon formed a sufficient estate to insure him a competent income. The profits which he derived from the theatre, in his double capacity of author and actor, have been estimated at two hundred pounds a year, a very considerable sum at that time; and if the liberalities of Lord Southampton were added to the economy of the poet, we may conclude that, at least, they were not unwisely employed. {112} Rowe, in his Life of Shakspeare, seems to think that the gifts of Queen Elizabeth also had some share in building up the fortune of her favorite poet. The grant of an escutcheon which was made, or rather confirmed to his father in 1599, proves a desire to bestow honor on his family. But there is nothing to indicate that Shakspeare obtained from Elizabeth and her court any marks of distinction superior, or even equal to those conferred by Louis XIV. upon Molière, like himself an actor and a poet. If we except his intimacy with Lord Southampton, Shakspeare, like Molière, chose his habitual acquaintance chiefly among men of letters, whose social condition he had probably contributed to elevate. The Mermaid Club, founded by Sir Walter Raleigh, and of which Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and many others were members, was long celebrated for the brilliant "wit-combats," which took place there between Shakspeare and Ben Jonson, and in which the vivacity of the former gave him an immense advantage over the laborious slowness of his opponent. The anecdotes which are quoted on this point are not worthy of being collected at the present day. Few _bons-mots_ are sufficiently good to survive for two centuries.

{113}

Who would not suppose that a life which had become so honorable and pleasant would long have retained Shakspeare in the midst of society conformable to the necessities of his mind, and upon the theatre of his glory? Nevertheless, in 1613, or 1614 at the latest, three or four years after having obtained from James I. the direction of the Blackfriars Theatre, without having apparently incurred the displeasure of the king to whom he was indebted for this new mark of favor, or of the public for whom he had just produced "Othello" and "The Tempest," Shakspeare left London and the stage to take up his residence at Stratford, in his house at New Place, in the midst of his fields. Had he become anxious to taste the joys of family life? He might have brought his wife and children to London. Nothing seems to indicate that he was greatly grieved at separation from them. During his residence in London, he used, it is said, to make frequent journeys to Stratford; but he has been accused of having found, on the road, pleasures of a kind which may have consoled him, at least, for the absence of his wife; and Sir William Davenant used loudly to boast of the poet's intimacy with his mother, the pretty and witty hostess of the Crown, at Oxford, where Shakspeare always stopped on his way to Stratford. If Shakspeare's sonnets were to be regarded as the expression of his dearest and most habitual feelings, we might reasonably be astonished at not finding in them a single allusion to his native place, to his children, or even to the son whom he lost at twelve years of age. And yet Shakspeare could not have been ignorant of the power of paternal love. He who, in "Macbeth," has described pity as "a naked, new-born babe;" he who has put these words into the mouth of Coriolanus,

"Not of a woman's tenderness to be,
Requires nor child nor woman's face to see;"

he who has so well depicted the tender puerilities of maternal affection, could not have looked upon his own children without experiencing the fond emotions of a father's heart. {114} But Shakspeare, as his character presents itself to our mind, had long been able to find, in the distractions of the world, enough to occupy the place, in his soul and life, which he was capable of giving up to family affections. However this may be, it is more difficult to discern the causes which led to his departure from London, than to perceive those which might have tended to prolong his residence in that city. Perhaps the arrival of infirmities may have warned him of the necessity of repose; and perhaps, also, the very natural desire of showing himself in his native place, under circumstances so different from those in which he had left it, made him hasten the moment of renouncing labors which no longer had the pleasures of youth for their compensation.

New pleasures could not fail to spring up for Shakspeare in his retirement. A natural disposition to enjoy every thing heartily rendered him equally adapted to delight in the calm happiness of a tranquil life, and to find enjoyment in the vicissitudes of an agitated existence. The first mulberry-tree introduced into the neighborhood of Stratford was planted by Shakspeare's hands, in a corner of his garden at New Place, and attested for more than a century the gentle simplicity of the occupations in which his days were spent. A competent fortune seemed to unite with the esteem and friendship of his neighbors to promise him that best crown of a brilliant life, a tranquil and honored old age, when, on the 23d of April, 1616, the very day on which he attained his fifty-second year, death carried him off from that calm and pleasant position, the happy leisure of which he would doubtless not have consecrated to repose alone.

{115}

We have no information regarding the nature of the disease to which he fell a victim. His will is dated on the 25th of March, 1616; but the date of February, effaced to make way for that of March, gives us reason to believe that he had commenced it a month previously. He declares that he had written it in perfect health; but the precaution taken thus opportunely, at an age still so distant from senility, leads to the presumption that some unpleasant symptom had awakened within him the idea of danger. There is no evidence either to confirm or to set aside this supposition; and Shakspeare's last days are surrounded by an obscurity even deeper, if possible, than that which enshrouds his life.

His will contains nothing very remarkable, with the exception of a new proof of the little estimation in which he held the wife whom he had so hastily married. After having appointed his daughter Susannah, who had married Mr. Hall, a physician at Stratford, his chief legatee, he bequeaths tokens of friendship to various persons, among whom he does not include his wife, but mentions her afterward, in an interlineation, merely to leave to her his "second best bed." A similar piece of forgetfulness, repaired in the same manner, is remarkable in reference to Burbage, Heminge, and Condell, the only ones of his theatrical friends of whom he makes mention; to each of these he bequeaths, also in an interlineation, thirty-six shillings, "to buy them rings." Burbage, the best actor of his time, had contributed greatly to the success of Shakspeare's plays; Heminge and Condell, seven years after his death, published the first complete edition of his dramatic works.

This singular omission of the name of Shakspeare's wife, repaired in so slight a manner, probably indicates something more than forgetfulness; and we are tempted to regard it as the sign of an aversion or dislike, the manifestation of which the poet was induced to modify, in a slight degree, by the approach of death alone.

{116}

Shakspeare's second daughter, Judith, had married a vintner, and received a much smaller share of her father's inheritance than her sister, Mrs. Hall. Was it in her quality of eldest daughter, or in consequence of some special predilection, that Shakspeare thus distinguished Susannah? An epitaph engraved upon her tomb, at her death in 1649, represents her as "witty above her sex," in which she had "something of Shakspeare," hut more because she was "wise to salvation," and "wept for all." About Judith we know nothing, except that she could not write; which fact is established by a deed still existing, to which she has affixed a cross, or some analogous sign, indicated by a marginal note as "Judith Shakspeare, her mark." Judith left three sons, who died childless. Susannah had one daughter, who married, first, Thomas Nash, and afterward Sir John Barnard, of Abington. No child was born of either of these marriages, and thus Shakspeare's posterity became extinct in the second generation.

It is somewhat remarkable that Shakspeare died on the same day as his great contemporary, Cervantes.

Shakspeare was buried in Stratford church, in which his tomb still exists. It represents the poet of the size of life, sitting under an arch, with a cushion before him, and a pen in his right hand. Like many other monuments of the time, the figure was originally colored after the life; the eyes being painted light brown, with hair and beard of a deeper tinge. The doublet was scarlet, and the gown black. The colors having become faded by time, were restored, in 1748, by Mr. John Ward, the grandfather of Mrs. Siddons and of Kemble, out of the profits of a performance of "Othello." But in 1793, Mr. Malone, one of the principal commentators upon Shakspeare, covered the statue with a thick coat of white paint; being doubtless led to do this by that exclusive prejudice in favor of modern customs which has so frequently led him into error in his commentaries. {117} An indignant traveler, in some lines written in the Album of Stratford church, has called down the malediction of the poet upon Malone,

"Whose meddling zeal his barb'rous taste displays,
And smears his tombstone, as he marred his plays."

Without giving an absolute assent to these harsh expressions of legitimate anger, we can not refrain from a smile at observing, in Mr. Malone's coat of white paint, a symbol of the spirit which dictated his commentaries, as well as a type of the general character of the eighteenth century, held in servitude by its own tastes, and incapable of comprehending any thing that did not enter into the sphere of its ordinary habits and ideas.

Although this injudicious reparation effected a great change in the physiognomy of the portrait of Shakspeare, it was not able altogether to efface that expression of gentle serenity which appears to have characterized the countenance as well as the soul of the poet. On the sepulchral stone below the monument, the following inscription is engraved:

"Good friend, for Jesus sake forbear
To dig the dust inclosed here.
Bless'd be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones."

These lines are said to have been composed by Shakspeare himself, and were the cause which prevented the transference of his tomb to Westminster, as had once been intended. Some years ago, an excavation by the wall of Stratford church exposed to view the grave in which his body had been laid; and the sexton, who, in order to prevent the sacrilegious depredations of curiosity or admiration, kept guard by the opening until the vault had been repaired, having attempted to look inside the tomb, saw neither bones nor coffin, but only dust. "It seems to me," says the traveler who relates this circumstance, "that it was something to have seen the dust of Shakspeare."

{118}

This tomb now remains in sole possession of the honors which it once shared with Shakspeare's mulberry-tree. About the middle of last century, the Rev. Mr. Gastrell, a man of large fortune, became the proprietor of New Place. This house, which had remained for some time in the possession of the Nash family, had afterward passed through several hands, and undergone many alterations; but the mulberry-tree remained standing, the object of the veneration of the curious. Mr. Gastrell, annoyed at the number of visitors which it attracted, had it cut down, with a savage brutality in which indifference would probably not have indulged, but which frequently characterizes that furious pride of liberty and property which would deem itself compromised if it yielded in the slightest degree to public opinion. A few years afterward, this same Mr. Gastrell, in consequence of a dispute which he had had with the town of Stratford regarding a slight tax which he was required to pay on his house, swore that _that_ house should never be taxed again, and he therefore had it pulled down, and sold the materials. As for the mulberry-tree, part of it was saved from the fire to which it had been consigned by Mr. Gastrell, by a clock-maker of Stratford, a man of sense, who gained a great deal of money by making it into snuff-boxes, toys, and other articles. The house in which Shakspeare was born still exists at Stratford, and is still shown as an object of interest to travelers, who may always see, and, it is said, are constantly able to purchase, either the chair or the sword of the poet, the lantern which he used in performing the part of Friar Lawrence in "Romeo and Juliet," or pieces of the arquebuse with which he killed the deer in Sir Thomas Lucy's park.

{119}

It is not from the death of Shakspeare that we must date, in England, that worship, the devotedness of which, after having been maintained with such fervor for sixty years, seems now to have diffused a reflection of its heat over several countries of Europe. Though Shakspeare was dead, Ben Jonson still lived; and though Beaumont had lost his friend Fletcher, he still possessed his talent, the effects of which had been weakened, rather than fortified, by Fletcher. The necessities of curiosity too often overcome those of taste; and the pleasure of going again to admire Shakspeare could not fail to yield to the keener interest of going to judge the newest productions of his competitors. It was not to his dramatic pedantry that Ben Jonson was then indebted for the empire which, in Shakspeare's lifetime, he did not venture to aspire to share. The triumphs of classical taste were confined, in his case, to the unanimous eulogies of the literary men of his time, who were easily satisfied on the score of regularity, and were always glad of an opportunity to avenge science upon the disdain of the vulgar; but the tragedies and comedies of Ben Jonson were not the less coolly received by the public, and were sometimes even rejected with an irreverence for which he afterward took his revenge in his prefaces. But his masques, a kind of opera, obtained general success; and the more Ben Jonson and the erudite strove to render tragedy and comedy tiresome, the more strongly did the public fall back upon masques for their amusement. Several poets of Shakspeare's school also endeavored to satisfy the taste of the public for the kind of pleasure to which he had accustomed them. {120} Their efforts, attended with varying success, but maintained with untiring activity, kept up that taste for the drama which survives the epoch of its master-pieces. About five hundred and fifty dramas, without reckoning those of Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, were printed before the Restoration of Charles II. Of these only thirty-eight can date from times anterior to Shakspeare; and it has been seen that, during his life, the custom was not to print those plays which were intended for representation on the stage. From 1640 to 1660, the Puritans closed nearly all the theatres; and most of these productions, therefore, belong to the twenty-five years which elapsed between the death of Shakspeare and the commencement of the civil wars. This was the weight beneath which the popularity of England's first dramatic poet succumbed for a time.

His memory, however, did not perish. In 1623, Heminge and Condell published the first complete edition of his dramas, thirteen of which only had been printed during his lifetime. His name was still held in respect; but for a finished reputation to inspire something beside respect, time must come to its aid, and must at first efface and suppress it, to give it at some future time the attraction of a neglected glory, and to stimulate the self-love and curiosity of inquiring minds to give it new life by a new examination, and to find in it the charm of a new discovery. A great writer rarely obtains, in the generation succeeding his own, the homage which posterity will lavish upon him. Sometimes even long spaces of time are necessary for the revolution commenced by a superior man to accomplish its course, and to bring the world to perceive its merits. Several causes combined to prolong the interval during which Shakspeare's works were regarded with coldness, and almost utterly forgotten.

{121}

The civil wars and the triumph of Puritanism occurred first, not only to interrupt all dramatic performances, but to destroy, as far as possible, every trace of amusement of this kind. The Restoration afterward introduced into England a foreign taste, which did not, perhaps, pervade the nation, but which held sway over the court. English literature then assumed a character which was not effaced by the new revolution of 1688; and French ideas, made honorable by the literary glory of the seventeenth century, and sustained by that of the eighteenth, retained in England a youthful and vigorous influence which had been lost by the old glories of Shakspeare. Fifty years after his death, Dryden declared that his idiom was a little "out of use." At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Lord Shaftesbury complained of his "natural rudeness, his unpolished style, and his antiquated phrase and wit;" and Shakspeare was then, for these reasons, excluded from several collections of the modern poets. In fact, Dryden did not understand Shakspeare, grammatically speaking; of this fact we have several proofs, and Dryden himself has proved, by recasting his pieces, that poetically he comprehended him as little. But not only was Shakspeare not understood, he soon became no longer known. In 1707, a poet named Tate produced a work entitled "King Lear," the subject of which, he said, he had borrowed from an obscure piece of the same name, recommended to his notice by a friend. This obscure piece was Shakspeare's "King Lear."

Distinguished writers, however, had not altogether ceased to allow Shakspeare a share in the literary glory of their country; but it was timidly and by degrees that they shook off the yoke of the prejudices of their time. If, in concert with Davenant, Dryden had recast the works of Shakspeare, Pope, in the edition which he published in 1725, contented himself with omitting all that he could not bring himself to regard as the work of the genius to whom he paid at least this homage. {122} With regard to that which he was obliged to leave, Shakspeare, says Pope, "having at his first appearance no other aim in his writings than to procure a subsistence," wrote "for the people," without seeking to obtain "patronage from the better sort." In 1765, Johnson, waxing bolder, and gaining encouragement from the dawn of a return to the national taste, vigorously defended the romantic liberties of Shakspeare against the pretensions of classical authority; and though he made some concessions to the contempt of a more polished age for the vulgarity and ignorance of the old poet, he at least had the courage to remark that, when a country is "unenlightened by learning, the whole people is the vulgar."

Shakspeare's works, then, were reprinted and commentated; but the mutilations alone obtained the honors of the stage. The Shakspeare amended by Dryden, Davenant, and others, was the only one which actors ventured to perform; and the "Tattler," having to quote some lines from "Macbeth," copied them from Davenant's amended edition. It was Garrick who, finding nowhere so fully as in Shakspeare means to supply the requirements of his own talent, delivered him from this disgraceful protection, lent to his ancient glory the freshness of his own young renown, and restored the poet to possession of the stage as well as of the patriotic admiration of the English.