Chapter VIII: Part 8

One is tempted to make this surmise serve to explain a famous argument which the Baconians derive from a letter written by a friend to Bacon in acknowledgment of the present of a volume which he had lately published. This friend was Tobie Matthew, a devoted adherent of Bacon, who had done him important service from time to time, and who consequently was frequently saluted with the little pots of incense which Tobie swung adoringly before his patron. Now Bacon wrote him a letter dated the 9th of April, the year not given; but it must have been after January, 1621, because Matthew's reply addresses the Viscount St. Albans, and Bacon did not receive that title previously to the above date. Bacon's letter accompanied a copy of a volume. Matthew's reply acknowledges this "great and noble token" of his "lordship's favor." And the Baconians claim that this token was the Folio of the Plays, published in 1623; and they point triumphantly to the postscript to Matthew's letter, which runs thus: "The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation, and of this side of the sea, is of your lordship's name, though he be known by another;" that is to say, a few intimate friends, like Matthew, knew perfectly well that Bacon wrote the plays, but suffered them, for prudential reasons, to appear under the name of Shakspeare, who doubtless had some hand in them. The temptation is, I say, to account for that postscript by supposing that Matthew was acquainted with those inferior passages which may have strayed into the plays from the pen of Bacon, that he appraised them with the judgment of a toady, and exaggerated their quantity as well as quality. This method for breaking the force of Matthew's postscript I reject, for the simple reason that it is not only strained, but superfluous; for Bacon published his "History of Henry VII." in March, 1622, the "De Augmentis" in October, 1623, and the "Apothegms" in December, 1624. One of these books, probably the first of them, and the first which Matthew had received from Bacon since he was made Viscount St. Albans, was sent; and Matthew took the first opportunity to flatter Bacon with his title in connection with his genius, saying in the postscript, "A most prodigious wit is my friend Bacon, though he now passes by the other designation as Viscount St. Albans."

It is alleged that Bacon did not wish to be reputed a poet, lest his preferment and prospects at the Court should be impaired. It seems to me that he needed not to dread the imputation of having written poems. Veins of a lively fancy run through the prose of his great treatises, and he was largely endowed with the scientific imagination; but his verses are dry as a remainder biscuit. The divine art was not in those days imputed to any man on such pretences.

One advocate of the Baconian theory thinks that the poems of "Lucrece" and "Adonis" were dedicated to Southampton, under the name of Shakspeare, as an arranged and designed cover, for the real author. But why, supposing this, was Shakspeare selected as the cover? A man selected for such a purpose must have been deemed by contemporaries competent to have written the poems, else there could have been no cover in using his name.

Did Ben Jonson, who was intimate with Bacon, know the secret of the authorship of the plays, and thus know that the manuscripts in use among the players must have been copies, and yet say, in praise of Shakspeare, "I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakspeare, that in writing (whatever he penned) he never blotted out a line"? Jonson could never have written so in the secret conviction that Shakspeare did not compose the lines, some of which Jonson _wished he had_ blotted.

With respect to the saying which was common among the players, the following points deserve consideration: First, it may have been a generalization carelessly made by admiring friends and comrades; second, what did they really know about it? They only saw the acting copies made for the theatre whose property they were. They knew nothing about Shakspeare's preliminary sketches and studies, the first drafts, the tentative outlines and passages. Third, the total absence of suspicion among them that he did not write the plays, but only copied them from some unknown author's manuscript, is unaccountable. Every probability would be against it. Among the players who knew Shakspeare, saw his daily life, computed how and where he spent his time, gauged him as a companion and a wit, such a secret would soonest leak out and spread all over London, or his reputed authorship would be soonest exploded and treated as a joke. For they and Jonson best knew the man. And this probability was not rebutted by Lord Palmerston; when, alluding to Jonson's remarks, he jauntily said, "Oh, these fellows will always stand up for each other!" for what reasons existed for protecting Shakspeare by reticence or by elaborate lying?

In the discussion, which has lately been renewed, upon the authorship of the plays, the points which are chiefly relied on by the Baconians are these: 1. The plays are _too great_, and out of all proportion to the obscurity which rests upon Shakspeare's life, and to the insignificance of his contemporary fame. 2. They are filled with all kinds of classical allusion, professional information, legal, medical, horticultural, scientific, to an extent which an obscure play actor could not possibly comprise within the limits of his ragged and scanty education. 3. The plays contain remarkable parallelisms with passages in Bacon's works, and coincidences of thought and expression.

These are the points of chief consequence which claim the plays for Bacon. To the critics who make this claim it is wonderful that one man from Stratford, so little known and prized, of whom no account of education and career survives, should have sent down to posterity, side by side with the great works of Bacon, compositions which are parallel in greatness and abreast of them in fame. They are too great for any one man of that epoch, unless that man be the greatest and wisest of his day. But how much more wonderful is the problem which, by implication, these critics set before us,--namely, to account for the fact that Bacon should have produced not only Shakspeare, a miracle for one mind, but himself besides! It taxes the resource of miracle less sharply to refer the plays back again to Shakspeare.

For which shall we prefer? To accredit Bacon with the authorship because he knew all the law and science which the plays include; or to accredit Shakspeare with it because he possessed all the poetic flow, imagery, and plastic art, all the passion and humor, which the plays include? Of the two sets of endowments, which could have resulted in the plays? Not the first without the second. But the second, then, being absolutely essential, must make the first to be also an essential accessory, whether we can or cannot account for the possessorship of it by Shakspeare. Because we can, from the published writings of Bacon, derive the fact that, however poetic his prose may sometimes be, and fertile in apposite wit and fancy, it does not supply the peculiar imagination, and, least of all, the genial sense of humor, which reigns through all the plays. If the more important qualities be impossible to Bacon, a sufficient accessory acquaintance with terms of law, facts of science, and scraps of classic learning may not be impossible to Shakspeare.

Let us ask, too, would Bacon have taken the risk of writing for the theatre? His relations with the Queen, his desires for office and persistent struggles to attain it, his exigency to keep a clean record with the Cecils and his other jealous rivals, are supposed to have been the motives for concealing his authorship. The opinion of public circles would have tainted him with the "vulgar scandal" of being a playwright. No doubt it would, and have effectually barred advancement. For he was known, watched, dreaded, appraised, opposed by too many people. His secret would not have waited two centuries for another Bacon to discover. How much worse for the aspiring statesman would have been an exposed concealment. The more exacting the motive for concealment appears, the more exacting appears the motive for doing nothing that required concealment.

All which Bacon did for the Court, from a politic disposition, in getting up masques and entertainments, was openly done. The labored and jejune speeches, and other matters, which he prepared for masques, have come down to us. He could be tolerated in this, and not in writing for the theatre, because a writer of plays could not wrest from public opinion the grave and stately responsibilities which he was eager to assume. Other lawyers of the day wrote for the stage; but they were not born in the line of England's chancellors.

And in those days the emoluments of a playwright were too trifling to attract a man like Bacon, who managed to keep himself so deeply in debt that once, at least, he breathed the air of a spunging-house. Nothing but place, retainers, royal donations of rented estates, and official fees, could save him from the moneylenders.

As it is supposed that Shakspeare was not well acquainted with the Latin writers, we are asked to account for the appearance of classical quotations in the plays from writers who had not yet been translated. In the "Taming of the Shrew," iii. 7, there is one from Ovid's Epistles. If Bacon wrote the play, we may suppose that he quoted directly from Ovid. Then why, in Act i. 1 of the same play, did he not quote a Latin line directly from Terence, instead of taking it from Lily's Grammar where the quotation is not correct? And suppose Shakspeare never did nor could read Ovid: it was easy enough for him to pick up those two lines for the fun in iii. 1, even if we reject the opinion that attributes large portions of an earlier form of the play to Marlowe. If Shakspeare only knew Latin through Lily's Grammar, he might have taken Terence from it; but Bacon's scholarship was above that.

A large part of the plot of the "Comedy of Errors" was drawn from the _Menæchmi_ of Plautus, a play which Bacon frequently quotes. On the supposition that Shakspeare was unacquainted with it, we easily account for his knowledge of the plot. A previous play, called the "Historie of Error," acted in 1577, was derived from the same comedy of Plautus; and William Warner's translation of it was freely handed about in manuscript for some time before the appearance of the "Comedy of Errors," though it was not entered at Stationers Hall till June, 1594.[15]

There is a curious parallelism between the fourth scene of Act iv. of the "Winter's Tale," where Perdita shows her tender knowledge of flowers, and Bacon's Essay on Gardens which was not printed till 1625. So it appears that both men were acquainted with the same facts concerning the succession of flowers through the months of the year. And there is nothing strange in that; for the flowers took their same times to bloom for Shakspeare in Stratford as they did for Bacon near London, or in the retreats of Gorhambury. But it is only enough to contrast the exquisite lines of Perdita with Bacon's cataloguing prose, in which not one epithet save "pale" and "yellow" appears, to feel quite sure that the flowers breathed no charm into Bacon's fancy.

"O Proserpina, For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou let'st fall From Dis's wagon! daffodils That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses, That die unmarried, ere they can behold Bright Phœbus in his strength."

If precious articles at public vendue--Gobelins, rare Palissys, Majolicas, and Sèvres ware--happen to tally with an auctioneer's list of the sale, does it seem quite credible that they were all the production of the auctioneer? "Merciful, wonder-making Heaven!" What a myriad-minded auctioneer!

Indeed, does any one dare to say that Shakspeare and Bacon did not compare notes upon many subjects? Many of the reputed parallelisms are indirect traces of such an intercourse; and it is not a sufficient objection that Shakspeare is nowhere mentioned by Bacon. Neither are Spenser and Marlowe; and we know that he was acquainted with Ben Jonson. Did Ben Jonson and Shakspeare never go to Gray's Inn together? Shakspeare helped Johnson to write his tragedy of "Sejanus;" and the latter was frequently with Bacon during the period of composition? I love to think, as it cannot be disproved, that Shakspeare met high themes of speculation, Nature's curious secrets, and choice allusions of learning, amid the books and apparatus of the philosopher, where problems dear to both these men were discussed. Such an intercourse as this, which varied his close companionship with Essex and Southampton, would be quite sufficient to account for the coincidences which support the Baconian theory: there is, for instance, the passage in "Troilus and Cressida" that puts into Hector's mouth a queer bit of didactic anachronism. Reproving Paris and Troilus, he says,--

"You have both said well; And on the cause and question now in hand Have gloz'd,--but superficially; not much Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought Unfit to hear moral philosophy."

Aristotle really alluded to "political philosophy;" and when we find that Bacon made the same mistake in his "Advancement of Learning," printed before the play, we think we can see that book in Shakspeare's hand, or overhear with him the error lapsing in the flow of conversation. But perhaps the passage which includes it was one of the parts of "Troilus and Cressida" which did not proceed from Shakspeare's pen. Certainly there was not poetic license enough in Bacon's mind to plant a seaport in Bohemia, and make Aristotle a contemporary of the Trojans. Neither would he have affronted his historical sense and hurt his reputation as a scholar by importing into "Henry VI.," and attributing to Jack Cade and his followers, the socialistic doctrine and mad behavior which Holingshed shows to have belonged to Wat Tyler in the reign of Richard II. It is also strange that the scholar, Bacon, should have put into the mouth of a person in "Coriolanus," i. 4, line 57, that allusion to Cato,--

"Thou wast a soldier
Even to Cato's wish."

M. Porcius Cato was born B.C. 234: the play belongs to B.C. 490. And if anybody knew when Galen was born, A.D. 130, it was Bacon; yet Menenius, in the same play, ii. 1, line 128, says, "The most sovereign prescription in Galen is but empiricutic." But Shakspeare's main object was to write a play, and co-ordinate his groups. So he paired off his characteristics with each other to gratify the poetic exigency of the play, and not always to render strict tribute to the Muse of History.

Can anybody positively deny that Shakspeare stole away from the Mermaid more often then his fellow-actors and poets relished, to spend the evening with Essex at Gray's Inn, perhaps while Bacon was busy upon his "Characters of Julius and Augustus Cæsar" in 1607-8,--for not long after that the famous tragedy appeared; perhaps to urge him with the happy suggestions of friendship to write his Defence of Shakspeare's own dear Essex? There was, indeed, that "semblable coherence" between the spirits of the philosopher and the poet which qualified them to be mutual instructors; and the mobile and apprehensive intellect of the poet could absorb without books the thoughts that filled the air round Bacon's head. The structure of Shakspeare, open at every pore to every influence, was pervaded with the conversations of his age: the interchange made a thoroughfare of him; and, as it passed, he detained all the nutriment that his imagination craved, and let the rest escape. He lived amid this impromptu wit and knowledge of illustrious friends, saturated with their atmosphere, passing it through the deep-breathing lungs to redden, and transmitting it by magnificent pulses to the hearts of his spectators, purged of superfluity, sweetened by gentleness, drenched in grace. By every sense, with the nerves of every touch, he appropriated character, love, theory, and life. London was library and university; and poetic intuition was the tutor of his soul. So--whether jesting at the Mermaid, and growing forgetive upon the sack; visiting the haunts of travellers and mariners to pick up strange tales; listening to the multifarious comment of a Bacon, and turning over his rarities of books; or lounging by the river-side with Southampton, the centre of a group of the most advanced, curious, brilliant men of the Elizabethan age--he became, in person, the coincidence which pervades the dramas; and all inquisitions upon the amount of literary culture which he achieved, or surmises about his earlier employments, become impertinent, if they are not made ridiculous, as his great, receptive, broad-domed soul covered over London's world and drew up its variety.

There is a kindred gift in Robert Browning, which makes its confession thus:--

"If we have souls, know how to see and use, One place performs, like any other place, The proper service every place on earth Was framed to furnish man with; serves alike To give him note that, through the place he sees, A place is signified he never saw, But, if he lack not soul, may learn to know."

The soul of the true artist being cosmopolitan, any place can become the centre of his circumference; for he is already outside of the world which his neighborhood is too little to embrace. Perhaps his neighbors are penurious step-dames who make scanty provision for emotion, and detest passionate experiences of every kind. But his imagination cannot starve. It implies all "the pomp and circumstance of glorious" life, just as the genius of creation involved and anticipated ourselves, who dress for it a perpetual banquet though no man sees it feeding, and none offer it their alms. The artist's soul transmutes the refuse of factories, the sweepings of coal, bone-parings, and street-scraps into the brilliant colors which, like clarions, precede Beauty's procession and summon the spectators.

If Lord Bacon wrote the plays, he must have conceived the female characters which invest them with such dignity and graciousness. To have done that required a comprehension of the varieties of the female disposition, such as could be derived only from personal contact and experience. To have seized some broad features of the plays, Bacon must have been acquainted with many degrees of social state beneath his own. We can trust Shakspeare in the tavern and its purlieus as frankly as we would the Persian poets, Saadi and Omer Khayam, who saw in the full cup a symbol of the divine afflatus. But we cannot imagine that Bacon was a frequenter of those London haunts where Dick the Butcher took his ale before Jack Cade decreed that the three-hooped pot should have ten hoops, and made it felony to drink small-beer; where Falstaff leered and tossed his ballast over in a sea of sack; where Parolles vapored, and Bardolph blushed, and Pistol's English grew tipsy; where Sir Andrew and Sir Toby roared catches, and Feste and the other clowns made excellent fooling into the small hours; where Bottom mildly exhaled at the head of the table at which Flute, Snout, and Starveling took their pots after the shop-shutters were up; where Dame Quickly maundered, and Mistress Overdone and Doll Tear-street made largess of their brassy smiles. A poet may convert the tavern-bench into a wool-sack: "This chair shall be my state, this dagger my sceptre, and this cushion my crown." But a Queen's Solicitor and future Lord Chancellor could not risk pawning the wool-sack for a tavern-bench. Even the gift of poetry would not have so badly endangered his prospects.

Bacon knew the wives and daughters of his friends and associates. He was at home in the families of the Pakingtons and Barnhams and Hattons. He doubtless noted the peculiarities of Lady Rich, Mistress Vernon, Elizabeth Throckmorton, and the other women of that crowd upon the steps of the throne. So many of these were cast in the same mould, that he would have been meagrely provided with female types, leaving us unable to account for the great range of character which fills the scene, from awkward Audrey to queenly Hermione, from Mistress Overdone to Imogen, from the Pander's wife to Marina, from Phebe to Perdita.

Moreover, search Bacon's writings upon this matter of knowledge of woman to find, if you can, hints and passages which are parallel with the plays in temper or language. Look for traces of that fervor which devotes the plays to the great central passion, and consecrates them with so many moods and styles of womanhood. Ransack his letters in vain for any deep consciousness of sex like that which makes every play personal and vital with something that cannot be put aside. Read his Essay on Love, and contrast its dry, pragmatic tone with the pages which palpitate with Juliet, or those over which Viola tenderly broods and Helena frankly shines. Can we imagine that essay to have been a treasured favorite of Desdemona, or to have beguiled Ophelia during the absence of her prince, or to have served Cleopatra except to hang on Antony's hook for a sinker, as for jest she hung the salted cod? Isabella might have safely furnished a copy of it to every nun in her convent; but Imogen, for all her "pudency so rosy," would not have taken it to bed with her, to read three hours and fold down the leaf where she left off. The warmest expression which Bacon was ever overheard to make is preserved in a speech in praise of love, written probably for a masque. The speaker says: "In the melting of a horse-shoe, can a mighty dead fire do as much as a small fire blown? In shaping metals, can a mighty huge weight do as much as a blow? It is motion, therefore, that animateth all things: it is vain to think that any strength of Nature can countervail a violent motion. Now, affections are the motions of the soul. Let no man fear the yoke of fortune that's in the yoke of love."

But the details which defend the Baconian theory are too numerous to be met and properly treated unless one had a volume's space at disposal. Each one is trivial; and the total effect of the theory depends upon a nice and patient construction of a cumulative argument, such as lawyers know how to use. Probably the majority of adherents to the theory will come from the legal profession, or from the class of minds that is trained to appreciate the importance of all the little points of some routine. But so long as the court before which this case is argued must have for judge a quick perception of the exigencies of the imagination, which include the delicacy that tests differences of intellectual structure and the broadness that adopts all vices, passions, whims, and humors, the details need not be separately pursued: their refutation, if still possible, is anticipated and made useless by the comprehensive verdict of an imagination that is kindred to the plays.

It is not entirely just to say that the contributions of men who favor the theory are specimens of literary futility. They are frequently valuable to the scholar of Shakspeare by throwing unexpected side-lights upon the plays: they also furnish suggestions to the interpreter. They have amassed a quantity of collateral information of Shakspeare's epoch which the critic will thankfully acknowledge as he uses it. The minute and laborious research which Judge Holmes has expended upon his volume, the literary, historical, and social parallelisms which he discloses, the philosophy and style of thinking of Elizabeth's age, put the lover of Shakspeare under obligation.

SHAKSPEARE'S WOMEN.

For many years before the time of Shakspeare, it had been customary upon the continent to assign to women the female characters of plays. But we do not find any trace of the employment of women upon the English stage till 1632. It is a mistake of Colley Cibber that no actresses had been seen on the stage previous to the Restoration. A French company that included women appeared in a play at Blackfriars in 1629, and were soundly hissed for this innovation upon British prejudice. In 1641, during the Puritan interdiction of plays, the actors drew up their "Stage-players' Complaint,"--"Our boys, ere we shall have liberty to act again, will be grown out of use, like cracked organ-pipes, and have faces as old as our plays." In 1660, a play was acted entirely by men. In 1661, the same play was acted with the help of female actors. After women had effected a lodgement upon the English stage, they still divided for a while with men the female characters. But, during the life of Shakspeare, squeaking tongues and downy cheeks used to "boy" the greatness of his female parts.

We can understand how this custom must have helped both the audience and the actors through the frequently broad dialogue of the coarsest plays of that period, where things and situations are mentioned with a frankness and precision which cannot now possibly be reproduced, except in the sugar-coated fashion of the Offenbachian revival. Women wore masks when they attended the theatre, and needed not to be at the expense of blushing. The slight disguise lent to them the illusion of being neuters in the crowd. The world was then unsqueamish and forced no scruples on the playwrights, whose coarseness differed from Shakspeare's in being lugged in for its own sake. His plots always countenance his freedom and adopt it. There is Shakspearean motive for every wanton page, as there is, too, genius in it, which other writers could not ape nor rival. Each feeling is so essential to the intercourse of his characters that he cannot disguise it: it is a state of nature that gambols like a child among its elders, more likely to be smiled at than reproved. The texts of the poet's frankness survive, but not as deliberate outrages to the modern womanhood which would fain not speak nor hear them; and they do not justify the expurgated editions which unfix them from their natural connections with the chastity and married honor involved on every page and in the drift of every play.

When his plots disguise female characters in the dress of boys and pages, it was more effectively done because his actors, thus resuming their natural mien, could so easily sustain the dramatic contrivance with the advantages of sex. And this is something which our modern female actors cannot imitate. At least, they do not appear to be interested to make the attempt, because they are misled by vanity to set off their little rounded waists and the feminine charm of figure and movements. Perhaps it is not vanity, but an instinct of womanhood, which lays this embargo on her mimic power.

An exception must be made of Mrs. Kean; for a play was always the thing to catch her conscience, and engage it to lend the utmost reality to the scene. As Wilford, in the "Iron Chest," she never forgot to assume the perfect stride and motion of a man; and as the disguised Viola, when the thought hit her that Olivia had fallen in love with her, she slapped her cap, and threw out her right leg with all the jauntiness of a boy, as she exclaimed, "I am the man!"

But, in general, the figure, gait, and instinctive movements of the actress continually betray the Imogen, the Viola, the Jessica, the Julia, the Rosalind, who may well say, "I could find in my heart to disgrace my man's apparel, and to cry like a woman." Portia says to Nerissa,--

"I'll hold thee any wager, When we are both accoutred like young men, I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two, And wear my dagger with the braver grace; And speak, between the change of man and boy, With a reed voice; and turn two mincing steps Into a manly stride."

But, when Shakspeare's smooth youngsters reassumed their characters as women, how the great poet must have been inwardly fretted with the incongruous presentation of the tone of masculinity in each passion, of the boy's smutch on the bloom of each emotion, the elbows wearing ragged holes through delicate sentiment, the scraggy shoulders and strong collar-bones working out of every tender phrase! He was forced to see a Cleopatra without "the entire and sinuous wealth of the shining shape" that held

"A soul's predominance I' the head so high and haught, except one thievish glance, From back of oblong eye, intent to count the slain."

It was Antony's Egypt without the fine malice and insinuation, stripped of the abjectness of her love which, grovelling for pardon at having wrecked her lord, makes him arrest her heart again to indemnify him for all his fortunes that had gone to pieces; as he answers to her cry for pardon,--

"Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates All that is won and lost. Give me a kiss; Even this repays me."

Could all Shakspeare's training have infected a boy's imagination with Juliet's ardent frankness, which tipped those lines with the sparkle of first love, and launched it from the balcony into the night, to be one star the more? And what boy or man could have returned to Shakspeare that motherhood of scorn which whitened the lip of Constance,--could have picked up and handed back to him the gauntletted verses of her defiance? His imagination must have wilted in that dryness of the actors; it was a limbo for the infants of his soul, out of which they never graduated: the tender grace of Perdita, doting over flowers as if they had natural instincts like her own, which ought not to be dismissed but rather claimed; the moan of distracted Ophelia, using flowers for tokens; the airy coquetries of Beatrice and Rosalind; the concealment preying on the bud of Viola's cheek; the gathering madness discharged in showers of pity on Cordelia's; the fell chastity of eye which made Iachimo's looks peruse the ground. All the distinctive temperament in the gestures, tones, allusions, of Shakspeare's women; all the difference of sex to which the verses strive to connect each emotion as it rises, to hold it a moment on the face, to detain it in the eyes, to send it scurrying by; that struggle of shyness with desire, the tremor of a heart that has a secret threatening to climb into sight, the anxious reticence that reaches to pull it down; the love that whets itself upon ambition's stone to the point of murder, and makes its hands of one color with the husband's; the swaying, queenly gait, the sinuous arms that would embrace when words were done, as Hermione descends slowly from the pedestal; the impromptu charm of Miranda's modesty when she would not wish any companion in the world but Ferdinand; the reverie of Desdemona, as she unpinned her dress to the tune of "Willow, willow, willow," and started at the wind, thinking it was Othello's knock, expectant but bodeful,--all the generic traits which differentiate Shakspeare's women from all the other women of literature, according as women themselves naturally furnish those traits, could never have been personated by any man.

How fortunate it is for a grateful posterity that it has been enabled to repay to Shakspeare a portion of its heavy debt to him, by committing his female characters to women of various talents and temperaments, some of whom are the brightest offspring of their age! Could he have foreseen, when the women of his fancy were consigned to the beardless tenors of London, that the true woman would eventually route these wretched eunuchs, claim the scene, appropriate her own verse, and infuse the whole unsuspected genius of her sex into his conceptions, to give them new births in the travailing of her bright endowments? That was a perfect forecast of the imagination which, with only youths for actors, whose chief advantage was the callowness upon the cheek, could have written the parts which have laid an attachment upon the finest women of the last two hundred years, and taxed all their passion, wile, and infinite variety. He must have written in a divining sense that Nature, piqued by the revelations of her deepest mystery, would have to summon at length its representatives to mediate, and, taking these things of heaven, show them unto men.

In some respects, the conceptions of Shakspeare have not found the later actors and actresses to be profitable allies, in so far as they have put a private stamp upon their favorite characters, and have levied duty upon his fancy that prefers free-trade even to direct dealing clear of middlemen with every heart. So does every sect hang over the great stream of the Bible, see its own face reflected there, and languish for it. Shakspeare's pages surprise actors with their own temperament, and make them long to embody it. So that our Shakspearean impressions are decided for us, and descend to our children through the style or school of great histrionic families, in the same way that congenital traits travel out of the past into the future: the traditional studies of great theatrical performers propagate themselves. Their excellences cannot be ignored, and they quite plausibly vindicate themselves as pure Shakspearean intentions. We accept these renderings, and soon become disturbed to have them challenged and displaced. It is a great but willing tribute which we pay to the genius of the artist when we confide the imagination of Shakspeare to his interpretations; just as we despatch our diamond to be ground and set. He sends it back to us flashing from facets which describe his individual skill.

But, in consequence of this genial submission of the spectator to the impressive portraiture, there arises a prejudice that Shakspeare could not have conceived otherwise, and that the character cannot and ought not to be repealed. In this way, for instance, some famous women have accustomed us to a Lady Macbeth who is full of grandeur, in whose solid and sombre person a suppressed cruelty smoulders. The verses protrude like claws of tigers; they clutch and rend: you may expect to overhear the lapping. The lower jaw of this conception is too square: the teeth of it are too relentlessly closed upon a victim. There is not an unoccupied space on cheek or brow where love can colonize; for all the space is pre-empted by a ravin to glut a lust for power. The woman's husband is only a lackey who must be whipped with scorpion phrases up to the deed that makes a queen of her. She detects a flavor of the milk of human kindness in him; and it makes her scowl till she shrieks to have the ministers of darkness turn her own milk to gall. She is the woman to carry back the daggers with the bluff composure of a butcher, and hoping to find that Duncan still bleeds, so that she may gild the faces of the grooms. You would not come upon her rampaging at midnight with a candle, rubbing at imaginary stains, and conning her secrets with fixed glassy eyes; for she is firmly constructed to know the blessedness of a bed and the balm of being conscienceless. Of such a wife Macbeth might well have said, "She should have died hereafter;" but she would not have found any time at all for such a weakness. I cannot discover the Lady Macbeth of Shakspeare in this too robust delineation.

Another kind of misrepresentation has issued from another quarter whence it should have been least expected. Some of the noblest women of modern times have filed a complaint against Shakspeare's women, and brought them into the court of the latest ideas, charged with the crime of being characterless, mere puppets of the will of the dominant sex; not the tutors, indeed, but the feeders of his riot, complaisant creatures who accept the purpose of the universe to keep men supplied with love, and whose most prominent traits are those which protect and confirm the union of the sexes. It is alleged that Shakspeare "never foretold a better woman than he saw," because "he lacked an ideal of humanity and life:" he withheld from her the personal consequence which belongs to strong individualities who detach themselves from their age to view, scrutinize, and remodel it. It is astonishing to read what Mrs. Farnham,[16] whose life was most unselfish and heroic, has said about Shakspeare's ideas of women, that "he authorized in his sentiments all manner of passional, sensual, and drunken usurpation of man over woman, every kind of force to degrade her which the law did not punish; and only felt bound to satirize and speak coarsely of _her_ after it had been exercised; men, who repeated such experiences never so often or basely, being no less heroes for his dramas, fit to lead in council, rule in honorable war, and receive the homage of society. The leading characteristics of woman, as he portrayed her, are sensuality, and fickleness, its uniform attendant in either sex; capriciousness, vanity, desire to be loved, more for the power than the pure happiness of it; a disposition to exercise that fleeting, petty power tyrannically,--so far, to play the man on the child's scale; weakness, helplessness indeed, against temptation, and a paramount selfishness which is only modified, or very rarely turned into generosity, towards the man whose love permits her to love in return; for which, and chiefly, in its narrowest, most material sense, she seems in his estimation to have been created."

It is not possible to misread the plays of Shakspeare more profoundly than this. They have been viewed in the color of some exclusive ideas concerning the nature and the mission of woman, in whose advocacy the writer spent a noble life. Not finding in any of the plays precise statements that reflect the most advanced sentiments upon the Woman Question, and discovering that Shakspeare was neither morally nor politically a partisan, and that neither position nor reflection impelled him to anticipate modern ideas on social subjects, the writer declares that he was not the poet of woman because he was not her prophet. A criticism more destructive than this of the Shakspearean delineations cannot be made. In fact, no _doctrinaire_ of ethics, politics, theology, can suitably approach Shakspeare with a critical purpose.

Nature seems to have draughted many of her women in the mind of Shakspeare before she embodied them to play their parts. Already there existed Antigone, Medea, Electra, and the ensky'd Beatrice; but these did not exhaust her capacity of womanhood. They seem only sketches of a few single features, portraits of isolated qualities that waited to be combined. Medea was the hate of a mortified and neglected love; Electra was the unsleeping persistency of a daughter's revenge; Antigone, the divine constancy of a daughter's affection; Ismene, the weakness of a common mind; Alcestis, the extravagant submission of a tender wife: they are all single strings of the old Greek lyre, never tuned to sweep into a perfect octave. The note which Alcestis emits is merely her willingness to die. Imogen sounds the same at the command of a husband who suspects her honor. But it wakes the harmony of other strings, and we listen to a chastity that is as spirited and deadly as it is submissive; to a love that is as eager as it is refined; to an honesty that exposes the discord of double dealing by chiming with a simplicity that scarce knows how to suspect; to a purity that is as unconscious as a girl, while it is as haughty as a man. The chords are rich and solid, and support the theme of her character through all its movements.

So women began to exist for the first time in literature. Shakspeare discovered woman, and took note of her generic peculiarity which upholds the specific differences of individual women. They all came forth to him as surely as flowers to the sun. He solicited each jealously interfolded sheath, and drew out of it the heart of its color. All of them are rooted in the common ground of sex; but each one lifts into the blossom her signals of a temper and modulation that are peculiarly her own. So that, although "each woman is a brief of Womankind," she is also a woman who must be designated by some one of Shakspeare's famous names.

In fact, genius was never penetrated with the varieties of woman's temperament till Shakspeare, picking up a few rustic specimens in Stratford, ran away with them to London, taking down there honest, red-fisted Audrey; Phebe, the village coquette, a little above her condition, who reads and quotes tender love-lore, and learns to despise a swain; Mopsa and Dorcas, doting on ballads, watchful after pedlars to chaffer with across the hedge for tapes and ribbons; and Juliet's gossipy, free-spoken, easy-minded Mrs. Gamp. With this humble retinue, his imagination travelled down to the great city, and seemed to have introduced them soon, past all the barriers of etiquette, into Elizabeth's circle of ladies, where they went into the service of high-born qualities, and retailed to him the very heart-secrets of their mistresses. The dames of wealthy citizens sat in full costume for his "Merry Wives;" the noble partners of his friends and patrons yielded each to him a whisper of their chasteness, their high-spirit, their control, their tenderness.

"In the blazon of sweet beauty's best
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,"

he mastered Beauty of the form and soul, and gave to each her portion, from Imogen to Cleopatra,--

"The worser spirit, a woman color'd ill."

One could not, of course, claim for Shakspeare that his pages include all the varieties of women which Nature is capable of producing. He has no daughters of the people, like Egmont's Clara and Faust's Margaret: they are conceptions of a later date. But they are implied in the quality of his women; and we incline to think that Nature will not be able to invent a fresh style of woman, or to modify the standard types, unless she sets out with that essential peculiarity, the Womanliness, which Shakspeare has described. As all the instruments of an orchestra are tuned upon a single pitch, and as all future modifications of the instruments must defer to the same if they mean to take rank in harmony, so all the women who are still possible to Nature must accord with her influential note. Shakspeare is content to strike that. Through all the chords which cluster around his different characters, we detect it: he seems to be making tuning-forks on the same pitch, but of various materials, to emphasize it to the ear. His plays take from it a consonant vibration that extends through scenes and lapses of time during which no woman's face appears. The tonic of her heart is diffused beyond the limits of her person; as when Ophelia's bloom clings to the fate of Hamlet, even while she waits in death for him to reach her funeral-rite. So the beautiful soul of Cordelia, that is little talked of by herself, and is but stingily set forth by circumstance, engrosses our feeling in scenes from whose threshold her filial piety is banished. We know what Lear is so pathetically remembering: the sisters tell us in their cruellest moments; it mingles with the midnight storm, a sigh of the daughterhood that was repulsed. In the pining of the Fool we detect it. Through every wail or gust of this awful symphony of madness, ingratitude, and irony, we feel a woman's breath.

Since Shakspeare's day, new countries have been discovered and peopled; new colonies have carried his mother-tongue around the earth; the language of woman, like the girdle of a goddess, is a zone drawn round all other climates to hold them in the clasp of her charm. The wider culture and the opportunities derived from modern wants have already increased the number of her gifts, and set her person in fresh shadings of character. Perhaps Macaulay's New Zealander, who is expected to meditate in the future over the ruins of London, will turn out to be a woman, of a variety which Shakspeare has nowhere precisely drawn. But, if all his plays should by that time have shared the fate of an extinguished England, there would she sit, the survivor in the direct line of descent from his essential Woman; by virtue of her sex the Sibyl foretelling the women who will be possible to Nature.

"Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo: Jam redit et Virgo."

Woman, as she resembles man, was of less consequence to Shakspeare than woman in herself, apart from what she can do, can earn, or can aspire to. He merely received the feminine side of Nature into his recreating thought, the essential Woman, without respect to the exigencies of any period or style of culture,--the only She, such as woman must remain to the end of time underneath all her activities and requirements. Her sex is the unalterable decree which she can cast no ballot to vote away from her, and assume no profession to raze it from the eternal tablets of her distinction. All the purely modern questions which relate to her career; the efforts to equalize with man's her wages, to multiply her opportunities, to claim her interest in the politics of human rights, to secure her alleviating presence in the rude scenes of republicanism,--successful as these tendencies may be,--cannot transform Woman; and she will not step out of her Shakspearean Self. On the figured coast of his page her Essence stands, as yet without the right of suffrage, limited to household cares, or raised to queenly ones; as learned as Portia can become, but not yet admitted to the profession which she mimicked; provided for by the various dexterities of man, and still undriven by the modern threat of starvation into risking a single quality that is her birthright. There she stands; the modern world, stooping at her feet, will have to yield some of the reputed exclusiveness of men, but only such traits of it as Imogen, Cordelia, Beatrice, Portia, will select. In all this complicated period of over-crowded cities, over-stimulated competition, vices overfed, employers over-purse-proud, and politicians over-careless, there is no strait cruel enough to compel the essential woman to choose a career which would have unsexed one of Shakspeare's plays. I have no fear. Stand aside: cease that frantic bracing of the masculine back against so many doors of prescription. Throw them wide open, and let Shakspeare's stately crowd pass up and down to scan the vista through them. Come, patient, chaste, obedient, high-spirited Imogen, too docile Ophelia, frank Perdita, warm Julia, bright and witty Beatrice, whose tongue is a pen already, or the etcher's tool; come, thou accomplished, grave, acute, and self-possessed Portia; thou unsophisticated Miranda, who would fain share thy lover's toil; thou shifty, prompt Maria, hater of humbug; thou tender Viola,--come, choose how many of these men's garments you will continue to wear, preferring to be women. Not one of them, I venture to declare, which your eternal instinct will feel to cramp or to disguise the form. "Dost thou think," says Rosalind, "though I am caparison'd like a man, I have a doublet and hose in my disposition?"

Perdita, I think, if she were not discovered to be a king's daughter, might take to floriculture, and earn a living by it. She would no longer keep her dainty pique against the gilly-flower, but learn to marry

"A gentler scion to the wildest stock,"

and thus mend Nature. She would prefer to be "Flora peering in April's front," along meadows which Proserpine might have roved through, far from the university and the din of scholarships. And pray restrain Ophelia from the commission of suicide by joining a nunnery; but do not save her life to put her to a trade that turns upon any other knack than simple beauty. A woman who can enthrall a Hamlet will esteem it no derogation to pluck from his memory a rooted sorrow. It is a profession quite as sanative as Helena's, whose father had taught her the use of curious drugs, and bequeathed to her "prescriptions of rare and prov'd effects." But let Ophelia be simply beautiful, be surprising like the first May-flowers, be winning like unobtrusive violets; let her exhale, like slopes that are brown with needles of the pine. Preserve the maid who held Hamlet's princely heart in the hollow of a moist and rosy hand: let her survive among us to hold others, to unwrinkle brows of speculation with a finger-tip, to unknot the snarls of business and ferocious care with kisses which the street will not overhear. Out of all her craze may she gather up again and redistribute the flowers of her shy disposition, "for remembrance; pray you, love, remember;" and some for herself too, "we may call it herb of grace o' Sundays."

Do not tempt Ophelia to drown herself again

"With annoyance of charity schools or of districts."

Turn over all such business to that pragmatic and correct Isabella: she will do better in it than in making a whole nunnery miserable with posted notices of the dangers to virtue and of rules for being severely let alone. But Ophelia,

"Live, be lovely, forget them, be beautiful even to proudness, Even for their poor sakes whose happiness is to behold you; Live, be uncaring, be joyous, be sumptuous; only be lovely,-- Sumptuous, not for display, and joyous, not for enjoyment; Not for enjoyment, truly; for Beauty and God's great glory. Built by that only law, that Use be suggester of Beauty, Nought be concealed that is done, but all things done to adornment, Meanest utilities seized as occasions to grace and embellish."

LOVE IN SHAKSPEARE.

The great motives and impulses of human nature do not find themselves made obsolete by Shakspeare's genius: we meet the central passion of Love animating every play, and modified by the various characteristics of his women. They appear in the plots, as in the world, to discharge that great function of their being. Steele once said of a woman, "To have loved her was a liberal education,"--a happy phrase which has done duty since in other connections. There must have been floating in Steele's mind the verses of Biron in "Love's Labor Lost;" at least, the pith of his sentence is there anticipated:--

"For when would you, my lord, or you, or you, Have found the ground of study's excellence, Without the beauty of a woman's face? From women's eyes this doctrine I derive: They are the ground, the books, the Academes, From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire. For where is any author in the world Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?"

"Without love I can fancy no gentleman," says Thackeray.

When Shakspeare shows his characters in love, the passion is as fresh and uncompromising as if it were still the morning of the world. His verse "dallies with the innocence of love, like the old age." The curious considerations of the modern novelist were not then invented. His lovers trump up no obstacles out of over-nice and subtle reflection: all that hampers them is circumstance, a family feud, a transparent jealousy, a disguise of fortune, a father's will, or a conspiracy. They do not take themselves apart before us, as lecturers do their manikin, to show how cunningly morbid the organs may become. There is no mesh of motives woven around and across, so intricately that if the lover breaks from one of his own threads he can catch himself by another, and keep worrying the poor fly of his feeling. Shakspeare's women love without sparing a moment for analysis: the rose is crushed to the bosom, a glory of stamens, petals, and perfume, whose names are unknown and unheeded; for the botanizing of emotions was the æsthetic of a later day when men cull a herbarium from their mothers' graves. In this regard Shakspeare is as direct as the Greeks, though far more vital. He puts into his live people the passion which the old chorus used to hold up like a placard:--

Love, thou invincible battle![17] Love, thou router of lucre, To capture the softness of youth And lodge in the bloom of its cheeks! 'Tis all one to thee if thou farest By sea, or dost loiter in farm-yards. It helps not to be an immortal; Mankind is no refuge from thee Who art of men the first madness. Thou dost ravish the just of their judgment, Dost snatch them to blame; Thou art the bicker that vexes The blood in the hearts that are kin. Vivid the promise of bride-bed Thou kindlest on eyelids of virgins, Great prescripts of past time undoing; So sports Aphrodite, and rules.