Note 75 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)

A serious misconception has been set up as to Shakespeare’s cast of mind by the persistence of editors in including among his works without discrimination plays which are certainly not his, as the Henry VI group, to which he contributed little, and in particular the First Part, of which he wrote probably nothing. It is on the assumption that that play is Shakespeare’s work that Lecky (Rationalism in Europe, ed. 1887, i, 105–106) speaks of “that melancholy picture of Joan of Arc which is perhaps the darkest blot upon his genius.” Now, whatever passages Shakespeare may have contributed to the Second and Third Parts, it is certain that he has barely a scene in the First, and that there is not a line from his hand in the La Pucelle scenes. Many students think that Dr. Furnivall has even gone too far in saying that “the only part ... to be put down to Shakespeare is the Temple Garden scene of the red and white roses” (Introd. to Leopold Shakespeare, p. xxxviii); so little is there to suggest even the juvenile Shakespeare there. (The high proportion of double-endings is a ground for reckoning it a late sample of Marlowe, who in his posthumously published translation of Lucan had approached that proportion. Cp. the author’s vol. on Titus Andronicus, p. 190.) But that any critical and qualified reader can still hold him to have written the worst of the play is unintelligible. The whole work would be a “blot on his genius” in respect of its literary weakness. The doubt was raised long before Lecky wrote, and was made good a generation ago. When Lecky further proceeds, with reference to the witches in Macbeth, to say (id. note) that it is “probable that Shakespeare ... believed with an unfaltering faith in the reality of witchcraft,” he strangely misreads that play. Nothing is clearer than that it grounds Macbeth’s action from the first in Macbeth’s own character and his wife’s, employing the witch machinery (already used by Middleton) to meet the popular taste, but never once making the witches really causal forces. An “unfaltering” believer in witchcraft who wrote for the stage would surely have turned it to serious account in other tragedies. This Shakespeare never does. On Lecky’s view, he is to be held as having believed in the fairy magic of the Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Tempest, and in the actuality of such episodes as that of the ghost in Macbeth. But who for a moment supposes him to have had any such belief? It is probable that the entire undertaking of Macbeth (1605?) and later of the Tempest (1610?) was due to a wish on the part of the theatre management to please King James, whose belief in witchcraft and magic was notorious. Even the use of the Ghost in Hamlet is an old stage expedient, common to the pre-Shakespearean play and to others of Kyd’s and Peele’s. Shakespeare significantly altered the dying words of Hamlet from the “heaven receive my soul” of the old version to “the rest is silence.” The bequest of his soul to the Deity in his will is merely the regulation testamentary formula of the time. In his sonnets, which hint his personal cast if anything does, there is no real trace of religious creed or feeling. And it is clearly the hand of Fletcher, a no less sensual writer than Peele, that penned the part of Henry VIII in which occurs the Protestant tag: “In her [Elizabeth’s] days ... God shall be truly known.”75