GEORGE BRANDES (continued 11)

XVI

HAMLET AND OPHELIA

There is nothing more profoundly conceived in this play than the Prince's relation to Ophelia. Hamlet is genius in love—genius with its great demands and its highly unconventional conduct. He does not love like Romeo, with a love that takes entire possession of his mind. He has felt himself drawn to Ophelia while his father was still in life, has sent her letters and gifts, and thinks of her with an infinite tenderness; but she has not it in her to be his friend and confidant. "Her whole essence," we read in Goethe, "is ripe, sweet sensuousness." This is saying too much; it is only the songs she sings in her madness, "in the innocence of madness," as Goethe himself strikingly says, that indicate an undercurrent of sensual desire or sensual reminiscence; her attitude towards the Prince is decorous, almost to severity. Their relations to each other have been close—how close the play does not tell.

There is nothing at all conclusive in the fact that Hamlet's manner to Ophelia is extremely free, not only in the affecting scene in which he orders her to a nunnery, but still more in their conversation during the play, when his jesting speeches, as he asks to be allowed to lay his head in her lap, are more than equivocal, and in one case unequivocally loose. We have already seen (p. 48) that this is no evidence against Ophelia's inexperience. Helena in All's Well that Ends Well is chastity itself, yet Parolles's conversation with her is extremely—to our way of thinking impossibly—coarse. In the year 1602, speeches like Hamlet's could be made without offence by a young prince to a virtuous maid of honour.

Whilst English Shakespearians have come forward as Ophelia's champions, several German critics (among others Tieck, Von Friesen, and Flathe) have had no doubt that her relations with Hamlet were of the most intimate. Shakespeare has intentionally left this undecided, and it is difficult to see why his readers should not do the same.

Hamlet draws away from Ophelia from the moment when he feels himself the appointed minister of a sacred revenge. In deep grief he bids her farewell without a word, grasps her wrist, holds it at arm's length from him, "peruses" her face as if he would draw it—then shakes her arm gently, nods his head thrice, and departs with a "piteous" sigh.

If after this he shows himself hard, almost cruel, to her, it is because she was weak and tried to deceive him. She is a soft, yielding creature, with no power of resistance; a loving soul, but without the passion which gives strength. She resembles Desdemona in the unwisdom with which she acts towards her lover, but falls far short of her in warmth and resoluteness of affection. She does not in the least understand Hamlet's grief over his mother's conduct. She observes his depression without divining its cause. When, after seeing the Ghost, he approaches her in speechless agitation, she never guesses that anything terrible has happened to him; and, in spite of her compassion for his morbid state, she consents without demur to decoy him into talking to her, while her father and the King spy upon their meeting. It is then that he breaks out into all those famous speeches: "Are you honest? Are you fair?" &c.; the secret meaning of them being: You are like my mother! You too could have acted as she did!

Hamlet has not a thought for Ophelia in his excitement after the killing of Polonius; but Shakespeare gives us indirectly to understand that grief on her account overtook him afterwards—"he weeps for what is done." Later he seems to forget her, and therefore his anger at her brother's lamentations as she is placed in her grave, and his own frenzied attempt to outdo the "emphasis" of Laertes's grief, seem strange to us. But from his words we understand that she has been the solace of his life, though she could not be its stay. She on her side has been very fond of him, has loved him with unobtrusive tenderness. It is with pain she has heard him speak of his love for her as a thing of the past ("I did love you once"); with deep grief she has seen what she takes to be the eclipse of his bright spirit in madness ("Oh, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!"); and at last the death of her father by Hamlet's hand deprives her of her own reason. At one blow she has lost both father and lover. In her madness she does not speak Hamlet's name, nor show any trace of sorrow that it is he who has murdered her father. Forgetfulness of this cruellest blow mitigates her calamity; her hard fate condemns her to solitude; and this solitude is peopled and alleviated by madness.

In depicting the relation between Faust and Gretchen, Goethe appropriated and reproduced many features of the relation between Hamlet and Ophelia. In both cases we have the tragic love-tie between genius and tender girlhood. Faust kills Gretchen's mother as Hamlet kills Ophelia's father. In Faust also there is a duel between the hero and his mistress's brother, in which the brother is killed. And in both cases the young girl in her misery goes mad. It is clear that Goethe actually had Ophelia in his thoughts, for he makes his Mephistopheles sing a song to Gretchen which is a direct imitation, almost a translation, of Ophelia's song about Saint Valentine's Day.[1] There is, however, a more delicate poetry in Ophelia's madness than in Gretchen's. Gretchen's intensifies the tragic impression of the young girl's ruin; Ophelia's alleviates both her own and the spectator's suffering.

Hamlet and Faust represent the genius of the Renaissance and the genius of modern times; though Hamlet, in virtue of his creator's marvellous power of rising above his time, covers the whole period between him and us, and has a range of significance to which we, on the threshold of the twentieth century, can foresee no limit.

Faust is probably the highest poetic expression of modern humanity—striving, investigating, enjoying, and mastering at last both itself and the world. He changes gradually under his creator's hands into a great symbol; but in the second half of his life a superabundance of allegoric traits veils his individual humanity. It did not lie in Shakespeare's way to embody a being whose efforts, like Faust's, were directed towards experience, knowledge, perception of truth in general. Even when Shakespeare rises highest, he keeps nearer the earth.

But none the less dear to us art thou, O Hamlet! and none the less valued and understood by the men of to-day. We love thee like a brother. Thy melancholy is ours, thy wrath is ours, thy contemptuous wit avenges us on those who fill the earth with their empty noise and are its masters. We know the depth of thy suffering when wrong and hypocrisy triumph, and oh! thy still deeper suffering on feeling that that nerve in thee is severed which should lead from thought to victorious action. To us, too, the voices of the mighty dead have spoken from the under-world. We, too, have seen our mother wrap the purple robe of power round the murderer of "the majesty of buried Denmark." We, too, have been betrayed by the friends of our youth; for us, too, have swords been dipped in poison. How well do we know that graveyard mood in which disgust and sorrow for all earthly things seize upon the soul. The breath from open graves has set us, too, dreaming with a skull in our hands!

XVII

HAMLET'S INFLUENCE ON LATER TIMES

If we to-day can feel with Hamlet, it is certainly no wonder that the play was immensely popular in its own day. It is easy to understand its charm for the cultivated youth of the period; but it would be surprising, if we did not realise the alertness of the Renaissance and its wonderful receptivity for the highest culture, to find that Hamlet was in as great favour with the lower ranks of society as with the higher. A remarkable proof of this tragedy's and of Shakespeare's popularity in the years immediately following its appearance, is afforded by some memoranda in a log-book kept by a certain Captain Keeling, of the ship Dragon, which, in September 1607, lay off Sierra Leone in company with another English vessel, the Hector (Captain Hawkins), both bound for India. They run as follows:—

"September 5 [At "Serra Leona"]. I sent the interpreter, according to his desier, abord the Hector, whear he brooke fast, and after came abord mee, wher we gave the tragedie of Hamlett.

"[Sept.] 30. Captain Hawkins dined with me, wher my companions acted Kinge Richard the Second.

"31. I envited Captain Hawkins to a ffishe dinner, and had Hamlet acted abord me: w^ch I permitt to keepe my people from idlenes and unlawfull games, or sleepe."

Who could have imagined that Hamlet, three years after its publication, would be so well-known and so dear to English sailors that they could act it for their own amusement at a moment's notice! Could there be a stronger proof of its universal popularity? It is a true picture of the culture of the Renaissance, this tragedy of the Prince of Denmark acted by common English sailors off the west coast of Africa. It is a pity that Shakespeare himself, in all human probability, never knew of it.

Hamlet's ever-increasing significance as time rolls on is proportionate to his significance in his own day. A great deal in the poetry of the nineteenth century owes its origin to him. Goethe interpreted and remodelled him in Wilhelm Meister, and this remodelled Hamlet resembles Faust. The trio, Faust, Gretchen, Valentin, in Goethe's drama answers to the trio, Hamlet, Ophelia, Laertes. Faust transplanted into English soil produced Byron's Manfred, a true though far-off descendant of the Danish Prince. In Germany, again, the Byronic development assumed a new and Hamlet-like (or rather Yorick-like) form in Heine's bitter and fantastic wit, in his hatreds and caprices and intellectual superiority. Borne is the first to interpret Hamlet as the German of his day, always moving in a circle and never able to act. But he feels the mystery of the play, and says aptly and beautifully, "Over the picture hangs a veil of gauze. We want to lift it to examine the painting more closely, but find that the veil itself is painted."

In France, the men of Alfred de Musset's generation, whom he has portrayed in his Confessions d'un Enfant du Siècle, remind us in many ways of Hamlet—nervous, inflammable as gunpowder, broken-winged, with no sphere of action commensurate with their desires, and with no power Of action in the sphere which lay open to them. And Lorenzaccio, perhaps Musset's finest male character, is the French Hamlet—practised in dissimulation, procrastinating, witty, gentle to women yet wounding them with cruel words, morbidly desirous to atone for the emptiness of his evil life by one great deed, and acting too late, uselessly, desperately.

Hamlet, who centuries before had been young England, and was to Musset, for a time, young France, became in the 'forties, as Borne had foretold, the accepted type of Germany. "Hamlet is Germany," sang Freiligrath.[1]

Kindred political conditions determined that the figure of Hamlet should at the same period, and twenty years later to a still greater extent, dominate Russian literature. Its influence can be traced from Pushkin and Gogol to Gontscharoff and Tolstoi, and it actually pervades the whole life-work of Turgueneff. But in this case Hamlet's vocation of vengeance is overlooked; the whole stress is laid on the general discrepancy between reflection and power of action.

In the development of Polish literature, too, during this century, there came a time when the poets were inclined to say: "We are Hamlet; Hamlet is Poland." We find marked traits of his character towards the middle of the century in all the imaginative spirits of Poland: in Mickiewicz, in Slowacki, in Krasinski. From their youth they had stood in his position. Their world was out of joint, and was to be set right by their weak arms. High-born and noble-minded, they feel, like Hamlet, all the inward fire and outward impotence of their youth; the conditions that surround them are to them one great horror; they are disposed at one and the same time to dreaming and to action, to over-much reflection and to recklessness.

Like Hamlet, they have seen their mother, the land that gave them birth, profaned by passing under the power of a royal robber and murderer. The court to which at times they are offered access strikes them with terror, as the court of Claudius struck terror to the Danish Prince, as the court in Krasinski's Temptation (a symbolic representation of the court of St. Petersburg) strikes terror to the young hero of the poem. These kinsmen of Hamlet are, like him, cruel to their Ophelia, and forsake her when she loves them best; like him, they allow themselves to be sent far away to foreign lands; and when they speak they dissemble like him—clothe their meaning in similes and allegories. What Hamlet says of himself applies to them: "Yet have I something in me dangerous." Their peculiarly Polish characteristic is that what enervates and impedes them is not their reflective but their poetic bias. Reflection is what ruins the German of this type; wild dissipation the Frenchman; indolence, self-mockery, and self-despair the Russian; but it is imagination that leads the Pole astray and tempts him to live apart from real life.

The Hamlet character presents a multitude of different aspects. Hamlet is the doubter; he is the man whom over-scrupulousness or over-deliberation condemns to inactivity; he is the creature of pure intelligence, who sometimes acts nervously, and is sometimes too nervous to act at all; and, lastly, he is the avenger, the man who dissembles that his revenge may be the more effectual. Each of these aspects is developed by the poets of Poland. There is a touch of Hamlet in several of Mickiewicz's creations—in Wallenrod, in Gustave, in Conrad, in Robak. Gustave speaks the language of philosophic aberration; Conrad is possessed by the spirit of philosophic brooding; Wallenrod and Robak dissemble or disguise themselves for the sake of revenge, and the latter, like Hamlet, kills the father of the woman he loves. In Slowacki's work the Hamlet-type takes a much more prominent place. His Kordjan is a Hamlet who follows his vocation of avenger, but has not the strength for it. The Polish tendency to fantasticating interposes between him and his projected tyrannicide. And while Slowacki gives us the radical Hamlet type, so we find the corresponding conservative Hamlet in Krasinski. The hero of Krasinski's Undivine Comedy has more than one trait in common with the Prince of Denmark. He has Hamlet's sensitiveness and power of imagination. He is addicted to monologues and cultivates the drama. He has an extremely tender conscience, but can commit most cruel actions. He is punished for the excessive irritability of his character by the insanity of his wife, very much as Hamlet, by his feigned madness, leads to the real madness of Ophelia. But this Hamlet is consumed by a more modern doubt than that which besets his Renaissance prototype. Hamlet doubts whether the spirit on whose behest he is acting is more than an empty phantasm. When Count Henry shuts himself up in "the castle of the Holy Trinity," he is not sure that the Holy Trinity itself is more than a figment of the brain.

In other words: nearly two centuries and a half after the figure of Hamlet was conceived in Shakespeare's imagination, we find it living in English and French literature, and reappearing as a dominant type in German and two Slavonic languages. And now, three hundred years after his creation, Hamlet is still the confidant and friend of sad and thoughtful souls in every land. There is something unique in this. With such piercing vision has Shakespeare searched out the depths of his own, and at the same time of all human, nature, and so boldly and surely has he depicted the outward semblance of what he saw, that, centuries later, men of every country and of every race have felt their own being moulded like wax in his hand, and have seen themselves in his poetry as in a mirror.

XVIII

HAMLET AS A CRITIC

Along with so much else, Hamlet gives us what we should scarcely have expected—an insight into Shakespeare's own ideas of his art as poet and actor, and into the condition and relations of his theatre in the years 1602-3.

If we read attentively the Prince's words to the players, we see clearly why it is always the sweetness, the mellifluousness of Shakespeare's art that his contemporaries emphasise. To us he may seem audacious, harrowingly pathetic, a transgressor of all bounds; in comparison with contemporary artists—not only with the specially violent and bombastic writers, like the youthful Marlowe, but with all of them—he is self-controlled, temperate, delicate, beauty-loving as Raphael himself. Hamlet says to the players—

"Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O! it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows, and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o'er-doing—Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

"I Play. I warrant your honour.

"Ham. Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor."

Here ought logically to follow a warning against the dangers of excessive softness and sweetness. But it does not come. He continues—

"Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was, and is, to hold, as't were, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure. Now, this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must, in your allowance, o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. O! there be players, that I have seen play,—and heard others praise, and that highly,—not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought that some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

"I Play. I hope we have reformed that indifferently with us.

"Ham. O! reform it altogether."

Thus, although it appears to be Hamlet's wish to caution equally against too much wildness and too much tameness, his warning against tameness is of the briefest, and he almost immediately resumes his homily against exaggeration, bellowing, what we should now call ranting declamation. It is not the danger of tameness, but of violence, that is uppermost in Shakespeare's mind.

As already pointed out, it is not merely his own general effort as a dramatist which Shakespeare here formulates; he lays down a regular definition of dramatic art and its aim. It is noteworthy that this definition is identical with that which Cervantes, almost at the same time, places into the mouth of the priest in Don Quixote. "Comedy," he says, "should be as Tullius enjoins, a mirror of human life, a pattern of manners, a presentation of the truth."

Shakespeare and Cervantes, who shed lustre on the same age and died within a few days of each other, never heard of each other's existence; but, led by the spirit of their time, both borrowed from Cicero their fundamental conception of dramatic art. Cervantes says so openly; Shakespeare, who did not wish his Hamlet to pose as a scholar, indicates it in the words, "Whose end, both at the first and now, was, and is."

And as Shakespeare here, by the mouth of Hamlet, has expressed his own idea of his art's unalterable nature and aim, he has also for once given vent to his passing artistic anxieties, his dissatisfaction with the position of his theatre at the moment. We have already (p. 106) noticed the poet's complaint of the harm done to his company at this time by the rivalry of the troupe of choir-boys from St. Paul's Cathedral playing at the Blackfriars Theatre. It is in Hamlet's dialogue with Rosencrantz that this complaint occurs. There is a bitterness about the wording of it, as though the company had for the time been totally worsted. This was no doubt largely due to the circumstance that its most popular member, its clown, the famous Kemp, had just left it (in 1602), and gone over to Henslow's troupe. Kemp had from the beginning played all the chief low-comedy parts in Shakespeare's dramas—Peter and Balthasar in Romeo and Juliet, Shallow in Henry IV., Lancelot in The Merchant of Venice, Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, Touchstone in As You Like It. Now that he had gone over to the enemy, his loss was deeply felt.

The above-mentioned little book, dedicated to Mary Fitton, gives us a most interesting glimpse into the English life of that age. The most important duty of the clown was not to appear in the play itself, but to sing and dance his jig at the end of it, even after a tragedy, in order to soften the painful impression. The common spectator never went home without having seen this afterpiece, which must have resembled the comic "turns" of our variety-shows. Kemp's jig of The Kitchen-Stuff Woman, for instance, was a screaming farrago of rude verses, some spoken, others sung, of good and bad witticisms, of extravagant acting and dancing. It is of such a performance that Hamlet is thinking when he says of Polonius: "He's for a jig, or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps."

As the acknowledged master of his time in the art of comic dancing, Kemp was immoderately loved and admired. He paid professional visits to all the German and Italian courts, and was even summoned to dance his Morrice Dance before the Emperor Rudolf himself at Augsburg. It was in his youth that he undertook the nine days' dance from London to Norwich which he describes in his book.

He started at seven o'clock in the morning from in front of the Lord Mayor's house, and half London was astir to see the beginning of the great exploit. His suite consisted of his "taberer," his servant, and an "overseer" or umpire to see that everything was performed according to promise. The journey was almost as trying to the "taberer" as to Kemp, for he had his drum hanging over his left arm and held his flageolet in his left hand while he beat the drum with his right. Kemp himself, on this occasion, contributed nothing to the music except the sound of the bells which were attached to his gaiters.

He reached Romford on the first day, but was so exhausted that he had to rest for two days. The people of Stratford-Langton, between London and Romford, had got up a bear-baiting show in his honour, knowing "how well he loved the sport"; but the crowd which had gathered to see him was so great that he himself only succeeded in hearing the bear roar and the dogs howl. On the second day he strained his hip, but cured the strain by dancing. At Burntwood such a crowd had gathered to see him that he could scarcely make his way to the tavern. There, as he relates, two cut-purses were caught in the act, who had followed with the crowd from London. They declared that they had laid a wager upon the dance, but Kemp recognised one of them as a noted thief whom he had seen tied to a post in the theatre. Next day he reached Chelmsford, but here the crowd which had accompanied him from London had dwindled away to a couple of hundred people.

In Norwich the city waits received him in the open market-place with an official concert in the presence of thousands. He was the guest of the town and entertained at its expense, received handsome presents from the mayor, and was admitted to the Guild of Merchant Venturers, being thereby assured a share in their yearly income, to the amount of forty shillings. The very buskins in which he had performed his dance were nailed to the wall in the Norwich Guild Hall and preserved in perpetual memory of the exploit.

So popular an artist as this must of course have felt himself at least Shakespeare's equal. He certainly assumed the right to address one of her Majesty's Maids-of-Honour with no slight familiarity. The tone in which he dedicates this catchpenny performance to Mrs. Fitton offers a remarkable contrast to the profoundly respectful tone in which professional authors couch their dedications to their noble patrons or patronesses:—

"In the waine of my little wit I am forst to desire your protection, else every Ballad-singer will proclaime me bankrupt of honesty.... To shew my duety to your honourable selfe, whose favours (among other bountifull friends) make me (dispight this sad world) iudge my hert Corke and my heeles feathers, so that me thinkes I could fly to Rome (at least hop to Rome, as the old Prouerb is) with a Morter on my head."

His description of the Nine Daies Wonder, with its arrogant dedication, has shown us how conceited he must have been. Hamlet lets us see that he had frequently annoyed Shakespeare by the irrepressible freedom of his "gags" and interpolations. From the text of the plays of an earlier period which have come down to us, we can understand that the clowns were in those days as free to do what they pleased with their parts as the Italian actors in the Commedia dell' Arte. Shakespeare's rich and perfect art left no room for such improvisations. Now that Kemp was gone, the poet sent the following shaft after him from the lips of Hamlet:—

"And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them: for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too: though, in the meantime, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it."

This reproof is, however, as the reader sees, couched in quite general terms; wherefore it was allowed to stand when Kemp returned to the company. But a far sharper and much more personal attack, which appears in the edition of 1603, was expunged in the following editions (and consequently from our text of the play), as being no longer in place after the return of the wanderer. It speaks of a clown whose witticisms are so popular that they are noted down by the gentlemen who frequent the theatre. A whole series of extremely poor specimens of his burlesque sallies is given—mere circus-clown drolleries—and then Hamlet disposes of the wretched buffoon by remarking that he "cannot make a jest unless by chance, as a blind man catcheth a hare."

It is notorious that an artist will more easily forgive an attack on himself than warm praise of a rival in the same line. There can be very little doubt that Shakespeare, in making Hamlet praise the dead Yorick, had in view the lamented Tarlton, Kemp's amiable and famous predecessor. If there had been no purpose to serve by making the skull that of a jester, it might quite as well have belonged to some old servant of Hamlet's. But if Shakespeare, in his first years of theatrical life, had known Tarlton personally, and Kemp's objectionable behaviour vividly recalled by contrast his predecessor's charming whimsicality, it was natural enough that he should combine with the attack on Kemp a warm eulogy of the great jester.[1]

Tarlton was buried on the 3rd of September 1588. This date accords with the statement in the first quarto that Yorick has lain in the earth for a dozen years. Not till we have these facts before us can we fully understand the following strong outburst of feeling:—

"Alas, poor Yorick!—I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?"

Alas, poor Yorick! Hamlet's heartfelt lament will keep his memory alive when his Owlglass jests recorded in print are utterly forgotten.[2] His fooling was equally admired by the populace, the court, and the theatrical public. He is said to have told Elizabeth more truths than all her chaplains, and cured her melancholy better than all her physicians.

Shakespeare, in Hamlet, has not only spoken his mind freely on theatrical matters; he has also eulogised the distinguished actor after his death, and given a great example of the courteous and becoming treatment of able actors during their lives. His Prince of Denmark stands far above the vulgar prejudice against them. And, lastly, Shakespeare has glorified that dramatic art which was the business and pleasure of his life, by making the play the effective means of bringing the truth to light and furthering the ends of justice. The acting of the drama of Gonzago's death is the hinge on which the tragedy turns. From the moment when the King betrays himself by stopping the performance, Hamlet knows all that he wants to know.

When James ascended the throne, Hamlet received, as it were, a new actuality, from the fact that his queen, Anne, was a Danish princess. At the splendid festival held on the occasion of the triumphal procession of King James, Queen Anne, and Prince Henry Frederick, from the Tower through the city, "the Danish March" was brilliantly performed, out of compliment to the Queen, by a band consisting of nine trumpeters and a kettle-drum, stationed on a scaffolding at the side of St. Mildred's Church. How this march went we do not know; but there can be little doubt that from that time it was played in the second scene of the fifth act of Hamlet, where music of trumpets and drums is prescribed, and where, in our days, at the Théâtre-Français, they naïvely play, "Kong Christian stod ved höjen Mast."[3]

XIX

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL—ATTACKS ON PURITANISM

The fortunes of the company having declined by reason of the competition complained of in Hamlet, it became necessary to intersperse a few comedies among the sombre tragedies on which alone Shakespeare's mind was now bent.

Comedies, therefore, had to be produced. But the disposition of mind in which Shakespeare had created A Midsummer Night's Dream had long deserted him; and infinitely remote, though so near in point of time, was the mood in which he had produced As You Like It.

Still the thing had to be done. He took one of his old sketches in hand again, the play called Love's Labour's Won, which has already been noticed (p. 47). Its original form we do not exactly know; all we can do is to pick out the rhymed and youthfully frivolous passages as having doubtless belonged to the earlier play, to whose title there is probably a reference in Helena's words in the concluding scene:—

"This is done. Will you be mine, now you are doubly won?"

It is clear that Shakespeare in his young days took hold of the subject with the purpose of making a comedy out of it. But now it did not turn out a comedy; the time was past when Shakespeare's chief strength lay in his humour. We could quite well imagine his subsequent tragedies to have been written by his Hamlet, if Hamlet had had life before him; and in the same way we could imagine this and the following play, Measure for Measure, to have been written by his Jaques.

We find many indications in All's Well that Ends Well— most, as was natural, in the first two acts—of Shakespeare's having come straight from Hamlet. In the very first scene, the Countess chides Helena for the immoderate grief with which she mourns her father: it is wrong to let oneself be so overwhelmed. Just so the King speaks to Hamlet of the "obstinate condolement" to which he gives himself up. The Countess's advice to her son, when he is setting off for France, reminds us strongly of the advice Polonius gives to Laertes in exactly the same situation. She says, for instance:—

"Thy blood and virtue Contend for empire in thee; and thy goodness Share with thy birthright! Love all, trust a few, Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy Rather in power than use, and keep thy friend Under thy own life's key: be check'd for silence, But never tax'd for speech."

Compare with these injunctions those of Polonius:—

"Give thy thoughts no tongue, Nor any unproportion'd thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar. The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel; But do not dull thy palm with entertainment Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade. Beware Of entrance to a quarrel; but, being in, Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee. Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice."

Notice also in this comedy the numerous sallies against court life and courtiers, which are quite in the spirit of Hamlet. The scene in which Polonius changes his opinion according as Hamlet thinks the cloud like a camel, a weasel, or a whale, and that in which Osric, who "did comply with his dug before he sucked it," reels off his elegant speeches, seem actually to be commented on in general terms when the Clown (ii. 2) thus discourses about the court:—

"Truly, madam, if God have lent a man any manners, he may easily put it off at court: he that cannot make a leg, put off's cap, kiss his hand, and say nothing, has neither leg, hands, lip, nor cap; and, indeed, such a fellow, to say precisely, were not for the court."

Now and again, too, we come upon expressions which recall well-known speeches of Hamlet's. For instance, when Helena (ii. 3) says to the First Lord:

"Thanks, sir; all the rest is mute,"

we are reminded of Hamlet's ever-memorable last words:

"The rest is silence."

Among other more external touches, which likewise point clearly to the period 1602-1603, may be mentioned the many subtle, cautious sallies against Puritanism which are interwoven in the play. They express the bitter contempt for demonstrative piety which filled Shakespeare's mind just at that time.

Hamlet itself had treated of a hypocrite on the largest scale. Notice, too, the stinging reference to existing conditions in Act iii. Scene 2:—

"Hamlet. Look you, how cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within's two hours.

"Ophelia. Nay, 'tis twice two months, my lord.

"Ham. So long? Nay, then, let the devil wear black, for I'll have a suit of sables. O heavens! die two months ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there's hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year; but by'r lady, he must build churches then, or else shall he suffer not thinking on, with the hobby-horse; whose epitaph is, 'For O! for, O! the hobby-horse is forgot.'"

In All's Well that Ends Well Shakespeare has his sanctimonious enemies constantly in mind. He makes the Clown jeer at the fanatics in both the Protestant and the Catholic camp. They may be of different faiths, but they are alike in being unlucky husbands. The Clown says (i. 3):—

"Young Charbon the Puritan, and old Poysam the Papist, how soe'er their hearts are severed in religion, their heads are both one; they may joll horns together, like any deer i' the herd."

A little farther on he continues:—

"Though honesty be no Puritan, yet it will do no hurt; it will wear the surplice of humility over the black gown of a big heart."

When Lafeu (ii. 3) is talking to Parolles of the marvellous cure of the King of France which Helena has undertaken, he has a hit at those who will find matter in it for a pious treatise:—

"Lafeu. I may truly say, it is a novelty to the world.

"Parolles. It is, indeed: if you will have it in showing, you shall read it in—what do you call there?—

"Laf. A showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor."

Shakespeare clearly took a mischievous pleasure in imitating the title of a Puritanic work of edification.

This polemical tendency, which extends from Hamlet through All's Well that Ends Well to Measure for Measure, in the form of an increasingly marked opposition to the growing religious strictness and sectarianism of the day, with its accompaniment of hypocrisy, proves plainly that Shakespeare at this time shared the animosity of the Government towards both Puritanism and Catholicism.

Though there is little true mirth to be found in All's Well that Ends Well, the piece reminds us in various ways of some of Shakespeare's real comedies. The story resembles in several details that of The Merchant of Venice. Portia in disguise persuades the unwilling Bassanio to give up his ring to her; and Helena, in the darkness of night mistaken for another, coaxes Bertram out of the ring which he had made up his mind she should never obtain from him. In the closing scenes, both Bertram and Bassanio are minus their rings; both are wretched because they have not got them; and in both cases the knot is unravelled by their wives being found in possession of them. There is a more essential relation—that of direct contrast—between the story of All's Well that Ends Well and that of The Taming of the Shrew. The earlier comedy sets forth in playful fashion how a man by means of the attributes of his sex—physical superiority, boldness, and coolness—helped out by imperiousness, bluster, noise, and violence, wins the devotion of a passionately recalcitrant young woman. All's Well that Ends Well shows us how a woman, by means of the attributes of her sex—gentleness, goodness of heart, cunning, and finesse—conquers a vehemently recalcitrant man. And in both cases the pair are married before the action proper of the play begins.

Seeing that Shakespeare in The Taming of the Shrew followed the older play on the same subject, and that he took the story of All's Well that Ends Well from Boccaccio's Gilette of Narbonne, a translation of which appeared as early as 1566 in Paynter's Palace of Pleasure, this contrast cannot be said to have been devised by the poet. But it is evident that one of the chief attractions of the latter subject for Shakespeare was the opportunity it offered him of delineating that rare phenomenon: a woman wooing a man and yet possessing and retaining all the charm of her sex. Shakespeare has worked out the figure of Helena with the tenderest partiality. Pity and admiration in concert seem to have guided his pen. We feel in his portraiture a deep compassion for the pangs of despised love—the compassion of one who himself has suffered—and over the whole figure of Helena he has shed a Raphael-like beauty. She wins all, charms all, wherever she goes—old and young, women and men—all except Bertram, the one in whom her life is bound up. The King and the old Lafeu are equally captivated by her, equally impressed by her excellences. Bertram's mother prizes her as if she were her daughter; more highly, indeed, than she prizes her own obstinate son. The Italian widow becomes so devoted to her that she follows her to a foreign country in order to vouch for her statement and win her back her husband.

She ventures all that she may gain her well-beloved, and in the pursuit of her aim shows an inventive capacity not common among women. For the real object of her journey to cure the King is, as she frankly confesses, to be near Bertram. As in the tale, she obtains the King's promise that she may, if she is successful in curing him, choose herself a husband among the lords of his court; but in Boccaccio it is the King who, in answer to her question as to the reward, gives her this promise of his own accord; in the play it is she who first states her wish. So possessed is she by her passion for one who does not give her a thought or a look. But when he rejects her (unlike Gilette in the tale), she has no desire to attain her object by compulsion; she simply says to the King with noble resignation—

"That you are well restored, my lord, I'm glad; let the rest go."

She offers no objection when Bertram, immediately after the wedding, announces his departure, alleging pretexts which she does not choose to see through; she suffers without a murmur when, at the moment of parting, he refuses her a kiss. When she has learnt the whole truth, she can at first utter nothing but short ejaculations (iii. 2): "My lord is gone, for ever gone." "This is a dreadful sentence!" "Tis bitter!"—and presently she leaves her home, that she may be no hindrance to his returning to it. Predisposed though she is to self-confidence and pride, no one could possibly love more tenderly and humbly.

All the most beautiful passages of her part show by the structure of the verse and the absence of rhyme that they belong to the poet's riper period. Note, for example, the lines (i. I) in which Helena tells how the remembrance of her dead father has been effaced in her mind by the picture of Bertram:—

"My imagination Carries no favour in't but Bertram's. I am undone: there is no living, none, If Bertram be away. It were all one That I should love a bright particular star, And think to wed it; he is so above me: In his bright radiance and collateral light Must I be comforted, not in his sphere. The ambition in my love thus plagues itself: The hind that would be mated by the lion Must die for love. 'Twas pretty, though a plague, To see him every hour: to sit and draw His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls, In our heart's table; heart too capable Of every line and trick of his sweet favour: But now he's gone, and my idolatrous fancy Must sanctify his relics."

If we compare the style of this passage with that which prevails in Helena's rhymed speeches, with their euphuistic word-plays and antitheses, the difference is very striking, and we feel what a distance Shakespeare has traversed since the days of his apprenticeship. Here we find no glitter of wit, but the utterance of a heart that loves simply and deeply.

Though the play as a whole was evidently not one of those which Shakespeare cared most about, and though he has allowed things to stand in it which preclude the possibility of a satisfactory and harmonious end, yet he has evidently concentrated his whole poetic strength on the development and perfection of Helena's most winning character. These are the terms (i. 3) in which, speaking to Bertram's mother, she makes confession of her love:—

"Be not offended, for it hurts not him, That he is lov'd of me. I follow him not By any token of presumptuous suit; Nor would I have him till I do deserve him, Yet never know how that desert should be. I know I love in vain, strive against hope; Yet, in this captious and intenible sieve I still pour in the waters of my love, And lack not to lose still. Thus, Indian-like, Religious in mine error, I adore The sun, that looks upon his worshipper, But knows of him no more."

There is something in her nature which anticipates the charm, earnestness, and boundless devotion with which Shakespeare afterwards endows Imogen. When Bertram goes off to the war, simply to escape acknowledging her and living with her as his wife, she exclaims (iii. 2)—

"Poor lord! is't I That chase thee from thy country, and expose Those tender limbs of thine to the event Of the none-sparing war? . . . O you leaden messengers, That ride upon the violent speed of fire, Fly with false aim; move the still-'pearing air, That sings with piercing, do not touch my lord! Whoever shoots at him, I set him there; Whoever charges on his forward breast, I am the caitiff that do hold him to it."

In this there is a fervour and a glow that we do not find in the earlier comedies. When one reads these verses, one understands how it is that Coleridge calls Helena, "Shakespeare's loveliest character."

Pity that this deep passion should have been inspired by so unworthy an object. It undoubtedly lessens the interest of the play that Shakespeare should not have given Bertram some more estimable qualities along with the all too youthful and unchivalrous ones which he possesses. The poet has here been guilty of a certain negligence, which shows that it was only to parts of the play that he gave his whole mind. Bertram is right enough in refusing to have a wife thrust upon him against his will, simply because the King has a debt of gratitude to pay. But this first motive for refusing gives place to one with which we have less sympathy: to wit, pride of rank, which makes him look down on Helena as being of inferior birth, though king, courtiers, and his own mother consider her fit to rank with the best. Even this, however, need not lower Bertram irretrievably in our esteem; but he adds to it traits of unmanliness, even of baseness. For instance, he enjoins Helena, through Parolles, to invent some explanation of his sudden departure which will make the King believe it to have been a necessity; and then he leaves her, not, as he falsely declares, for two days, but for ever. His readiness to marry a daughter of Lafeu the moment the report of Helena's death has reached him is a very extraordinary preparation for the reunion of the couple at the end of the play, and reminds us unpleasantly of the exactly similar incident in Much Ado About Nothing (p. 217). But, worst of all, and an indisputable dramatic mistake, is his entangling himself, just before the final reconciliation, in a web of mean lies with reference to the Italian girl to whom he had laid siege in Tuscany.

It was to make Helena's position more secure, and to avoid any suspicion of the adventuress about her, that Shakespeare invented the character of the Countess, that motherly friend whose affection sets a seal on all her merits. In the same way Parolles was invented with the purpose of making Bertram less guilty. Bertram is to be considered as ensnared by this old "fool, notorious liar, and coward" (as Helena at once calls him), who figures in the play as his evil genius.

Parolles in Love's Labours Won was doubtless a gay and purely farcical figure—the first slight sketch for Falstaff. Coming after Falstaff, he necessarily seems a weak repetition; but this is no fault of the poet's. Still, it is very plain that in the re-writing Shakespeare's attempt at gaiety missed fire. His frame of mind was too serious; the view of the subject from the moral standpoint displaces and excludes pure pleasure in its comicality. Parolles, who has Falstaff's vices without a gleam of his genius, brings anything but unmixed merriment in his train. The poet is at pains to impress on us the lesson we ought to learn from Parolles's self-stultification, and the shame that attends on his misdeeds. Thus the Second Lord (iv. 3), speaking of the rascality he displays in his outpourings when he is blindfolded, says—

"I will never trust a man again for keeping his sword clean, nor believe he can have everything in him by wearing his apparel neatly."

And Parolles himself says when his effrontery is crushed (iv. 3)—

"If my heart were great, 'Twould burst at this. Captain I'll be no more; But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft As captain shall: simply the thing I am Shall make me live. Who knows himself a braggart, Let him fear this; for it will come to pass That every braggart shall be found an ass"

The other comic figure, the Clown, witty as he is, has not the serene gaiety of the earlier comedies. He speaks here and there, as already noted (p. 49), in the youthfully whimsical style of the earliest comedies; but as a humoristic house-fool he does not rank with such a sylvan fool as Touchstone, a creation of a few years earlier, nor with the musical court-fool in Twelfth Night.

A single passage in All's Well that Ends Well has always struck me as having a certain personal note. It is one of those which were quite evidently added at the time of the re-writing. The King is speaking of Bertram's deceased father, and quotes his words (i. 2)—

"'Let me not live,'— Thus his good melancholy oft began, On the catastrophe and heel of pastime, When it was out,—'Let me not live,' quoth he, 'After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses All but new things disdain.'... This he wish'd: I, after him, do after him wish too."

A courtier objects to this despondent utterance—

"You are lov'd, sir; They that least lend it you shall lack you first."

Whereupon the King replies with proud humility—

"I fill a place, I know't."

These words could not have been written save by a mature man, who has seen impatient youth pressing forward to take his place, and who has felt the sting of its criticism. The disposition of mind which here betrays itself foretells that overpowering sense of the injustice of men and of things which is soon to take possession of Shakespeare's soul.

XX

MEASURE FOR MEASURE—ANGELO AND TARTUFFE

A covert polemical intention could be vaguely divined here and there in All's Well that Ends Well. It contained, as we have seen, some incidental mockery of the increasing Puritanism of the time, with its accompaniment of self-righteousness, moral intolerance, and unctuous hypocrisy. The bent of thought which gave birth to these sallies reappears still more clearly in the choice of the theme treated in Measure for Measure.

The plot of All's Well that Ends Well turns on the incident, familiar in every literature, of one woman passing herself off for another at a nocturnal rendezvous, without the substitution being detected by the man—an incident so fruitful in dramatic situations, that even its gross improbability has never deterred poets from making use of it.

A standing variation of this theme, also to be found in the most diverse literatures, is as follows:—A man is condemned to death. His mistress, his wife, or his sister implores the judge to pardon him. The judge promises, on condition that she shall pass a night with him, to let the prisoner go free, but afterwards has him executed all the same.

This subject has been treated over and over again from mediæval times down to our own days, its latest appearances, probably, being in Paul Heyse's novel, Der Kinder Sünde der Väter Fluch, and in Victorien Sardou's play La Tosca. In Shakespeare's time it appeared in the form of an Italian novella in Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi (1565), on which an English dramatist, George Whetstone, founded his play, The Right Excellent and Famous History of Promos and Cassandra (1578), and also a prose story in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses, published in 1582. Whetstone's utterly lifeless and characterless comedy is the immediate source from which Shakespeare derived the outlines of the story. He is indebted to Whetstone for nothing else.

What attracted Shakespeare to this unpleasant subject was clearly his indignation at the growing Pharisaism in matters of sexual morality which was one outcome of the steady growth of Puritanism among the middle classes. It was a consequence of his position as an actor and theatrical manager that he saw only the ugliest side of Puritanism—the one it turned towards him.

Its estimable sides well deserved a poet's sympathy. Small wonder, indeed, that independent and pious men should seek the salvation of their souls without the bounds of the Anglican State Church, with its Thirty-Nine Articles, to which all clergymen and state officials were bound to swear, and to which all citizens must make submission. It was a punishable offence to use any other ritual than the official one, or even to refuse to go to church. The Puritans, who dreamed of leading the Christian Church back to its original purity, and who had returned home after their banishment during the reign of Mary with the ideal of a democratic Church before their eyes, could not possibly approve of a State Church subject to the crown, or of such an institution as Episcopacy. Some of them looked to Scottish Presbyterianism as a worthy model, and desired to see Church government by laymen, the elders of the congregation, introduced into England, in place of the spiritual aristocracy of the bishops. Others went still farther, denied the necessity of one common form of worship for all, and desired to have the Church broken up into independent congregations, in which any believer might officiate as priest. We have here the germs of the great party division in Cromwell's time into Presbyterians and Independents.

So far as we can see, Shakespeare took no interest whatever in any of these ecclesiastical or religious movements. He came into contact with Puritanism only in its narrow and fanatical hatred of his art, and in its severely intolerant condemnation and punishment of moral, and especially of sexual, frailties. All he saw was its Pharisaic aspect, and its often enough only simulated virtue.

It was his indignation at this hypocritical virtue that led him to write Measure for Measure. He treated the subject as he did, because the interests of the theatre demanded that the woof of comedy should be interwoven with the severe and sombre warp of tragedy. But what a comedy! Dark, tragic, heavy as the poet's mood—a tragi-comedy, in which the unusually broad and realistic comic scenes, with their pictures of the dregs of society, cannot relieve the painfulness of the theme, or disguise the positively criminal nature of the action. One feels throughout, even in the comic episodes, that Shakespeare's burning wrath at the moral hypocrisy of self-righteousness underlies the whole structure like a volcano, which every moment shoots up its flames through the superficial form of comedy and the interludes of obligatory merriment.

And yet it is not really against hypocrisy that his attack is aimed. At this stage of his development he is far too great a psychologist to depict a ready-made, finished hypocrite. No, he shows us how weak even the strictest Pharisee will prove, if only he happens to come across the temptation which really tempts him; and how such a man's desire, if it meets with opposition, reveals in him quite another being—a villain, a brute beast—who allows himself actions worse a hundredfold than those which, in the calm superiority of a spotless conscience, he has hitherto punished in others with the utmost severity.

It is not a type of Shakespeare's opponents that he here unmasks and brands—it is a man in many ways above the average type, as he saw it. The chief character in Measure for Measure is the judge of public morality, the hard and stern Censor morum, who in his moral fanaticism believes that he can root out vice by persecuting its tools, and imagines that he can purify and reform society by punishing every transgression, however natural and comparatively harmless, as a capital crime. The play shows us how this man, as soon as a purely sensual passion takes possession of him, does not hesitate to commit, under the mask of piety, a crime against real morality so revolting and so monstrous that no expression of loathing and contempt would be too severe for it, and scarcely any punishment too rigorous.

From its nature such a drama ought to end by appeasing in some satisfactory manner the craving for justice awakened in the spectator. But comedy was what Shakespeare's company wanted; and besides, it would have been unwise, and perhaps even dangerous, to carry to extremities this question of the punishment of moral hypocrisy. So the knot in the play was summarily loosed, without any great expenditure of pathos, by the provident care and timely intervention of a wise and invisibly omnipresent prince, an occidental Haroun-al-Raschid. Fastidious in his choice of means this prince was not. With an ingenuity which is profoundly unsatisfactory to any one of the least delicacy of feeling, he substitutes a lovable girl, whom the iniquitous judge had at one time promised to marry, for the beautiful young woman who is the object of his bestial desire.

The Duke, wishing to test his servants, gives out that he is leaving Vienna on a long journey. He intrusts the regency during his absence to Angelo, an official of high standing and reputation.

No sooner does Angelo come into power than he begins a regular crusade against licentiousness and all laxity in the domain of morals. In the first place, he decrees that all houses of ill-fame in the city of Vienna are to be pulled down. In the older drama by Whetstone, which Shakespeare used as a foundation for his play, there was a whole troop of disreputable personages, procuresses, prostitutes, bullies, improper characters of every description. Shakespeare retains part of this company; he has a single procuress, Mistress Overdone, who reminds us slightly of Doll Tearsheet, a single bully, that very amusing personage, Pompey; and he adds to them an extremely entertaining character, the utterly dissolute but witty tattler and liar, Lucio.

But the chief alteration he makes in the subject-matter of the play is that the Duke, disguised as a friar, is witness from the beginning of Angelo's abuse of his power as ruler and judge. Among other advantages resulting from this modification, we must reckon the fact that the spectators are thus reassured in advance as to the final issue. On the Duke's disguise, moreover, depends most of the comic effect arising out of the character of Lucio, who is constantly repeating to him the most absurd slanders about himself, as if he had them from the best authority. Further, the Duke's concealed presence is essential to the other great change made in the story, namely, that Isabella is not really required to sacrifice herself for her brother, her place being filled, as in All's Well that Ends Well, by a woman who has old claims on the man concerned. In this manner the too revoltingly painful part of the subject is avoided.

Shakespeare has imagined one of the men who were the bitterest enemies of his art and his calling invested with absolute power, and using it to proceed against immorality with cruel rigour. The first step is his attack on common prostitution, which he persuades himself he can exterminate. This vain imagination is repeatedly ridiculed. "What shall become of me?" says Mistress Overdone. "Come; fear not you: good counsellors lack no clients." In the Act ii. sc. I we read:—

"Escalus. How would you live, Pompey? by being a bawd? What do you think of the trade, Pompey? is it a lawful trade?

"Pompey. If the law would allow it, sir.

"Escal. But the law will not allow it, Pompey; nor it shall not be allowed in Vienna.

"Pomp. Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city.

"Escal. No, Pompey.

"Pomp. Truly, sir, in my poor opinion, they will to't then."

And Lucio (iii. 2) also ridicules Angelo's severity as fruitless:—

"Lucio. A little more lenity to lechery would do no harm in him: something too crabbed that way, friar.

"Duke. It is too general a vice, and severity must cure it.

"Lucio. Yes, in good sooth, the vice is of a great kindred: it is well allied; but it is impossible to extirp it quite, friar, till eating and drinking be put down. They say, this Angelo was not made by man and woman, after this downright way of creation: is it true, think you?"

But besides taking strict proceedings against actual debauchery, Angelo revives an old law which has long been in disuse—according to the Duke for fourteen, according to Claudio for nineteen years—making death the punishment of all sexual commerce without marriage; and by this law young Claudio is condemned to death for his relation to Juliet.

It was an innocent relation. He says (i. 3):—

"She is fast my wife Save that we do the denunciation lack Of outward order: this we came not to, Only for propagation of a dower Remaining in the coffer of her friends."

But this avails nothing. An example is to be made. It is in vain that even the highly respectable Provost feels compassion for him, and says (ii. 2):—

"All sects, all ages smack of this vice, and he To die for it!"

The young men of the town cannot explain this insane severity in any other way than by the supposition that Lord Angelo is a man with "snow-broth" in his veins in place of blood.

It soon appears, however, that he is not the man of ice he is taken to be.

Escalus, an old, honourable nobleman, bids him bear in mind that though his own virtue be of the straitest, it has, perhaps, never been tempted; had it been exposed to temptations, it might not have stood the test better than that of others. Angelo answers haughtily that to be tempted is one thing, to fall another. But now comes Claudio's sister, Isabella, young, charming, and intelligent, and beseeches him to spare her brother's life (ii. 2):—

"Good, good my lord, bethink you: Who is it that hath died for this offence? There's many have committed it."

He is inexorable. She shows the unreason of punishing so stringently the errors of love:

"Isab. Could great men thunder As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet, For every pelting, petty officer Would use his heaven for thunder; nothing but thunder.— Merciful heaven! Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt Splitt'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak, Than the soft myrtle."

And she continues in such a strain, that we cannot but hear the poet's voice through hers:—

"But man, proud man! Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd, His glassy essence,—like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens, Would all themselves laugh mortal."

And she appeals to his own self-knowledge:—

"Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know That's like my brother's fault."

He invites her to come again the next day; and hardly is she gone when, in a monologue, he reveals his hateful passion, and even hints at his still more hateful purpose of forcing her to gratify it in payment for her brother's release.

He makes her his proposal. She is appalled; she now sees, like Hamlet, what life can be, what undreamt-of horrors can happen, to what a pitch villainy can be carried, even on the judgment-seat:—

"O, 'tis the cunning livery of hell, The damned'st body to invest and cover In princely guards! Dost thou think, Claudio?— If I would yield him my virginity, Thou mightst be freed."

She cannot even denounce him, for, as he himself points out to her, no one will believe her; his stainless name, his strict life and high rank, will stifle the accusation if she dares to make it. Feeling himself safe, he is doubly audacious. Thus, when, at the conclusion of the play (v. 3), she lays her indictment before the reinstated Duke, Angelo says brazenly, "My lord, her wits, I fear me, are not firm." Then follows, as if in continuation of Isabella's just-quoted speech, the fiery protest springing from the poet's intensest conviction:—

"Make not impossible That which but seems unlike. 'Tis not impossible, But one, the wicked'st caitiff on the ground, May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute, As Angelo."

(See p. 241.)

But the protest has no immediate result. Isabella is, for the time being, sent to prison for slandering a man of unblemished honour. And the irony is kept up to the last. The Duke, in his character as a friar, has learnt bitter lessons; amongst others, that there is hardly enough honesty in the world to hold society together. But when he himself, in his disguise, relates what he has witnessed, his own faithful servants are on the point of sending him also to prison. In his rôle of Haroun-al-Raschid, he has seen and realised that law is made to serve as a screen for might. Thus he says—

"My business in this state Made me a looker-on here in Vienna, Where I have seen corruption boil and bubble Till it o'er-run the stew: laws for all faults, But faults so countenanc'd, that the strong statutes Stand like the forfeits in a barber's shop, As much in mock as mark. 'Escal. Slander to the state! Away with him to prison."

As a play, Measure for Measure rests entirely on three scenes: the one in which Angelo is tempted by Isabella's beauty; that in which he makes the shameless, proposal that she shall give her honour in exchange for her brother's life; and, thirdly, that most dramatic one in which Claudio, after first hearing with fortitude and indignation what his sister has to tell him of Angelo's baseness, breaks down, and, like Kleist's Prince of Homburg two centuries later, begins meanly to beg for his life. Round these principal scenes are grouped the many excellent and vigorously realistic comic passages, treated in a spirit which afterwards revived in Hogarth and Thackeray; and other scenes designed solely to retard the dramatic wheel a little, which, therefore, jar upon us as conventional. It is, for example, an entirely unjustifiable experiment which the Duke tries on Isabella in the fourth act, when he falsely assures her that her brothers head has already been cut off and sent to Angelo. This is introduced solely for the sake of an effect at the end.

In this very unequally elaborated play, it is evident that Shakespeare cared only for the main point—the blow he was striking at hypocrisy. And it is probable that he here ventured as far as he by any means dared. It is a giant stride from the stingless satire on Puritanism in the character of Malvolio to this representation of a Puritan like Angelo. Probably for this very reason, Shakespeare has tried in every way to shield himself. The subject is treated entirely as a comedy. There is a threat of executing first Claudio, then the humorous scoundrel Barnardine, whose head is to be delivered instead of Claudio's; Barnardine is actually brought on the scene directly before execution, and the spectators sit in suspense; but all ends well at last, and the head of a man already dead is sent to Angelo. A noble maiden is threatened with dishonour; but another woman, Mariana, who was worthy of a better fate, keeps tryst with Angelo in her stead, and this danger is over. Finally, threats of retribution close round Angelo, the villain, himself; but after all he escapes unpunished, being merely obliged to marry the amiable girl whom he had at an earlier period deserted. In this way the play's terrible impeachment of hypocrisy is most carefully glozed over, and along with it the pessimism which animates the whole.

For it is remarkable how deeply pessimistic is the spirit of this play. When the Duke is exhorting Claudio (iii. I) not to fear his inevitable fate, he goes farther in his depreciation of human life than Hamlet himself when his mood is blackest:—

"Reason thus with life:— If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing That none but fools would keep; a breath thou art, Servile to all the skyey influences, That do this habitation, where thou keep'st, Hourly afflict. Merely, thou art death's fool; For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun, And yet runn'st toward him still. . . . . . . . . . Happy thou art not; For what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get, And what thou hast, forgett'st. Thou art not certain; For thy complexion shifts to strange effects, After the moon. If thou art rich, thou'rt poor; For, like an ass, whose back with ingots bows, Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey, And death unloads thee. Friends hast thou none; For thine own bowels, which do call thee sire, The mere effusion of thy proper loins, Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum, For ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth, nor age, But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep, Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms Of palsied eld: and when thou art old and rich, Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty To make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this, That bears the name of life? Yet in this life Lie hid more thousand deaths; yet death we fear, That makes these odds all even."

Note with what art and care everything is here assembled that can confound and abash the normal instinct that makes for life. Here for the first time Shakespeare anticipates Schopenhauer.

It is clear that in this play the poet was earnestly bent on proving his own standpoint to be the moral one. In hardly any other play do we find such persistent emphasis laid, with small regard for consistency of character, upon the general moral.

For example, could there be a more direct utterance than the Duke's monologue at the end of Act iii.:—

"He who the sword of heaven will bear Should be as holy as severe; Pattern in himself to know, Grace to stand, and virtue go; More nor less to others paying, Than by self-offences weighing. Shame to him whose cruel striking Kills for faults of his own liking! Twice treble shame on Angelo, To weed my vice, and let his grow!"

Similarly, and in a like spirit, the moral pointer comes into play wherever there is an opportunity of showing how apt princes and rulers are to be misjudged, and how recklessly they are disparaged and slandered.

Thus the Duke says towards the close of Act iii.:—

"No might nor greatness in mortality Can censure scape: black-wounding calumny The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?"

And later (iv. I), again:—

"O place and greatness! millions of false eyes Are stuck upon thee. Volumes of report Run with these false and most contrarious quests Upon thy doings."

It is quite remarkable how this dwelling on baseless criticism by subjects is accompanied by a constant tendency to invoke the protection of the sovereign, or, in other words, of James I., who had just ascended the throne, and who, with his long-accumulated bitterness against Scottish Presbyterianism, was already showing himself hostile to English Puritanism. Hence the politic insistence, at the close, upon a point quite irrelevant to the matter of the play: all other sins being declared pardonable, save only slander or criticism of the sovereign. Lucio alone, who, to the great entertainment of the spectators, has told lies about the Duke, and, though only in jest, has spoken ill of him, is to be mercilessly punished. To the last moment it seems as if he were to be first whipped, then hanged. And even after this sentence is commuted in order that the tone of comedy may be preserved, and he is commanded instead to marry a prostitute, it is expressly insisted that whipping and hanging ought by rights to have been his punishment. "Slandering a prince deserves it," says the Duke, at the beginning of the final speech.

This attitude of Shakespeare's presents an exact parallel to that of Molière in the concluding scene of Tartuffe, sixty years later. The prince, in accordance with James of Scotland's theories of princely duty, appears as the universally vigilant guardian of his people; he alone chastises the hypocrite, whose lust of power and audacity distinguish him from the rest. The appeal to the prince in Measure for Measure answers exactly to the great Deus-ex-machinâ speech in Tartuffe, which relieves the leading characters from the nightmare that has oppressed them:—

"Nous vivons sous un prince, ennemi de la fraude, Un prince dont les yeux se font jour dans les cœurs Et que ne peut tromper tout l'art des imposteurs."

In the seventeenth century kings were still the protectors of art and artists against moral and religious fanaticism.

XXI

ACCESSION OF JAMES AND ANNE—RALEIGH'S FATE— SHAKESPEARE'S COMPANY BECOME HIS MAJESTY'S SERVANTS—SCOTCH INFLUENCE.

In Measure for Measure it is not only the monarchical tone of the play, but some quite definite points, that mark it out as having been produced at the time of James's accession to the throne in 1603. In the very first scene there is an allusion to the new king's nervous dislike of crowds. This peculiarity, which caused much surprise on the occasion of his entrance into England, is here placed in a flattering light. The Duke says:—

"I'll privily away: I love the people, But do not like to stage me to their eyes. Though it do well, I do not relish well Their loud applause and Aves vehement, Nor do I think the man of safe discretion That does affect it."

It is also with unmistakable reference to James's antipathy for a throng that Angelo, in Act ii. sc. 4, describes the crowding of the people round a beloved sovereign as an inadmissible intrusion:—

"So play the foolish throngs with one that swoons, Come all to help him, and so stop the air By which he should revive: and even so The general, subject to a well-wish'd king, Quit their own part, and in obsequious fondness Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love Must needs appear offence."

Elizabeth had breathed her last on the 24th of March 1603. On her deathbed, when she could no longer speak, she had made the shape of a crown above her head with her hands, to signify that she chose as her successor one who was already a king. Her ministers had long been in secret negotiation with James VI. of Scotland, and had promised him the succession, in spite of a provision in Henry VIII.'s will which excluded his elder sister's Scottish descendants from the throne. This had to be set aside; for there was not in the younger line any personage of sufficient distinction to be at all eligible. There was obvious advantage, too, in uniting the crowns of England and Scotland on one head; too long had the neighbour kingdoms wasted each other's energies in mutual feuds. All parties in the nation agreed with the ministers in looking to James as Elizabeth's natural successor. The Protestants felt confidence in him as a Protestant; the Catholics looked for better treatment from the son of the Catholic martyr-queen; the Puritans hoped that he, as a new and peace-loving king, would sanction such alterations in the statutory form of worship as should enable them to take part in it without injury to their souls. Great expectations greeted him.

Hardly was the breath out of Queen Elizabeth's body when Sir Robert Carey, a gentleman on whom she had conferred many benefits, but who, in his anxiety to ensure the new King's favour, had post-horses standing ready at every station, galloped off to be the first to bring the news to James in Edinburgh. On the way he was thrown from his horse, which kicked him on the head; but in spite of this he reached Holyrood on the evening of the 26th of March, just after the King had gone to bed. He was hurriedly conducted into the bed-chamber, where he knelt and greeted James by the title of King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland. "Hee gave mee his hand to kisse," writes Carey, "and bade me welcome." He also promised Carey a place as Gentleman of the Bed-Chamber, and various other things, in reward for his zeal; but forgot all these promises as soon as he stood on English ground.

In London all preparations had been carefully made. A proclamation of James as King had been drawn up by Cecil during Elizabeth's lifetime, and sent to Scotland for James's sanction. This the Prime Minister read, a few hours after the Queen's death, to an assembly of the Privy Council and chief nobility, and a great crowd, of the people, amidst universal approbation. Three heralds with a trumpeter repeated the proclamation in the Tower, "whereof as well prysoners as others rejoyced, namely, the Earle of Southampton, in whom all signes of great gladnesse appeared." Not without reason; for almost the first order James gave was that a courier should convey to Southampton the King's desire that he should at once join him and accompany him on his progress through England to London, where he was to receive the oath of allegiance and to be crowned.

On the 5th of April 1603, James I. of Great Britain left Edinburgh to take possession of his new kingdom. His royal progress was a very slow one, for every nobleman and gentleman whose house he passed invited him to enter; he accepted all invitations, spent day after day in festivities, and rewarded hospitality by distributing knighthoods in unheard-of and excessive numbers. One of his actions was unequivocally censured. At Newark "was taken a cutpurse doing the deed," and James had him hanged without trial or judgment. The displeasure shown made it plain to him that he could not thus assume superiority to the laws of England. In Scotland there had been a general demand for a strong monarchy, which could hold the nobles and the clergy in check; in England the day for this was over, and the new King's successors learned to their cost the futility of trying to carry on the traditions of despotism on English soil.

James himself was received with the naïve, disinterested joy with which the mass of the people are apt to greet a new monarch, of whose real qualities nothing is yet known, and with the less disinterested flatteries by which every one who came into contact with the King sought personal favour in his eyes.

There was nothing kingly or even winning in King James's exterior. Strange that the handsome Henry Darnley and the beautiful Mary Stuart should have had such an insignificant and ungainly son! He was something over middle height, indeed, but his figure was awkward, his head lumpish, and his eyes projecting. His language was the broadest Scotch, and when he opened his mouth it was rather to spit out the words than to speak; he hustled them out so that they stumbled over each other. He talked, ate, and dressed like a peasant, and, in spite of his apparently decorous life, was addicted to the broadest improprieties of talk, even in the presence of ladies. He walked like one who has no command over his limbs, and he could never keep still, even in a room, but was always pacing up and down with clumsy, sprawling movements. His muscles were developed by riding and hunting, but his whole appearance was wanting in dignity.

The shock inflicted on his mother during her pregnancy, by Rizzio's assassination, probably accounts for his dread of the sight of drawn steel. The terrorism in which he was brought up had increased his natural timidity. While he was yet but a youth, the French ambassador, Fontenay, summed up his description of him thus: "In one word, he is an old young man."

Now, in the thirty-sixth year of his age, he was a learned personage, full of prejudices, wanting neither in shrewdness nor in wit, but with two absorbing passions—the one for conversation on theological and ecclesiastical matters, and the other for hunting expeditions, to which he sometimes gave up so much as six consecutive days. He had not Elizabeth's political instinct; she had chosen her councillors among men of the most different parties; he admitted to his council none but those whose opinions agreed with his own. But his vanity was quite equal to hers. He had the pedant's boastfulness; he was fond of bragging, for instance, that he could do more work in one hour than others in a day; and he was especially proud of his learning. Some Shakespeare students have, as already observed, seen in him the prototype of Hamlet. He was certainly no Hamlet, but rather what Alfred Stern somewhere calls him—a Polonius on the throne. We have a description by Sir John Harington of an audience James gave him in 1604. The King "enquyrede muche of lernynge" in such a way as to remind him of "his examiner at Cambridge aforetyme," quoted scraps of Aristotle which he hardly understood himself, and made Harington read aloud part of a canto of Ariosto. Then he asked him what he "thoughte pure witte was made of," and whom it best became, and thereupon inquired whether he did not think a king ought to be "the beste clerke" in his country. Farther, "His Majestie did much presse for my opinion touchinge the power of Satane in matter of witchcraft, and ... why the Devil did worke more with anciente women than others." This question Sir John boldly and wittily answered by reminding him of the preference for "walking in dry places" ascribed in Scripture to the Devil. James then told of the apparition of "a bloodie heade dancinge in the aire," which had been seen in Scotland before his mother's death, and concluded: "Now, sir, you have seen my wisdome in some sorte, and I have pried into yours. I praye you, do me justice in your reporte, and, in good season, I will not fail to add to your understandinge, in suche pointes as I may find you lacke amendmente." Perhaps only one European sovereign since James has so plumed himself on his own omniscience.

James's relations with England during Elizabeth's reign had not been invariably friendly. Nourishing a lively ill-will to the Presbyterian clergy, who were always trying to interfere in matters of state, he had in 1584, at the age of eighteen, appealed to the Pope for assistance for himself and his imprisoned mother. But the very next year, in consideration of the payment of a pension of £4000 a year, he concluded a treaty with Elizabeth. When this was ratified in 1586, his mother disinherited him and nominated Philip II. her successor. At the very time when the trial of Mary Stuart was going on, James made application to have his title as heir to the throne of England acknowledged. This unworthy, unchivalrous proceeding made it impossible for him in any way to interfere with the carrying out of whatever sentence the English Government chose to pronounce in his mother's case. Nevertheless her execution naturally affected him painfully, and it was his resentment that made him hasten on his long-planned marriage with the Danish princess Anne, daughter of Frederick II.—an alliance which he knew to be disagreeable to Elizabeth. He gained a political advantage by it, Denmark waiving her claim to the Orkney Islands.

His bride, born at Skanderborg towards the close of 1574, was at the time of her marriage not fifteen years old—a pretty, fair-skinned, golden-haired girl. Daughter of a Lutheran father and the Lutheran Sophia of Mecklenburg, she had been brought up in Lutheran orthodoxy. She had received some instruction in chemistry from Tycho Brahe; but her education, on the whole, had been rather that of a spoilt child. Great ideas had been instilled into her of what it meant to belong to the royal house of Denmark, so that she agreed with her future husband in a conviction of the importance of kingly state. Other features of her character were good-humour, inborn wit, and a superficial gaiety which sometimes went to unguarded lengths. Her behaviour, only three years after her marriage, gave rise to a scandal—public opinion (doubtless unjustly) making James accessory to the assassination of the Earl of Murray, whom it was supposed that he had good reasons for wishing out of the way.

The difficulties which beset Anne's voyage from Denmark to Scotland in 1589 are well known. A storm, for raising which many Danish "witches" and no fewer than two hundred luckless Scottish crones had to suffer at the stake, drove the bride to Oslo in Norway. The impatient bridegroom then undertook the one romantic adventure of his life and set off in search of her. He found her at Oslo, was married there, and spent the winter in Denmark.

As Queen of Scotland, Anne already showed herself possessed by the same mania for building which characterised her brother, Christian IV. As Queen of England she aroused dissatisfaction by her constant coquetting with Roman Catholicism. By her own wish, the Pope sent her gifts of all sorts of Catholic gimcracks; they were taken from her, and the bearer was consigned to the Tower. She showed a certain amiable independence in the sympathy and good-will which she displayed towards Sir Walter Raleigh, whom her husband imprisoned in the Tower; but on the whole she was an insignificant woman, pleasure-loving and pomp-loving (consequently a patroness of those poets who, like Ben Jonson, wrote masques for court festivals), and, in contrast to the economical Elizabeth, so extravagant that she was always in debt. Very soon after her arrival in England, she owed enormous sums to jewellers and other merchants.

The new King soon disappointed the hopes which Puritans and Catholics had cherished as to his tolerance. Even during the course of his journey from Edinburgh to London numerous petitions for the better treatment of Dissenters had been handed to him, and he seemed to give good promises to both parties. But as early as January 1604, on the occasion of a conference he summoned at Hampton Court, there was a rupture between him and the Puritans—the very mention of the word "Presbyter" making him furious. The formula, "No bishop, no king," though not invented by him, expressed his principles. And when the House of Commons favoured measures of a Puritan tendency, he retaliated by proroguing Parliament, after rebuking the House in undignified and boastful terms. He complained in this speech that whereas in Scotland he had been regarded "not only as a king but as a counsellor," in England, on the contrary, there was "nothing but curiosity from morning to evening to find fault with his propositions." "There all things warranted that came from me. Here all things suspected," &c. &c. The Puritan clergy, who refused to accept the Anglican ritual, were driven from their livings.

The Catholics fared still worse. James had at first intended to lighten the heavy penalties to which they were subject, but the discovery of Catholic conspiracies led him to change his mind. The Catholic priests and the pupils of the Jesuit schools were banished. After the discovery of Guy Fawkes's great Gunpowder Plot in 1605, the position of the Catholics naturally became as bad as possible.

One of the most marked traits in James's political character was his eagerness to bring about and preserve peace with Spain. While yet on the way to London, he ordered a cessation of all hostilities, and by 1604 he had concluded peace. One of the reasons for his at once assuming a hostile attitude towards Raleigh was that he was well acquainted with Raleigh's hatred of Spain and disinclination to peace with that country; and Raleigh increased the King's displeasure during the following months by constantly urging upon him a war policy. But there were other and less impersonal reasons for the King's hostility. Raleigh had been Elizabeth's favourite, and had in 1601 presented to her a state-paper drawn up by himself on "The Dangers of a Spanish Faction in Scotland," the rumoured contents of which had so alarmed James that he offered Elizabeth the assistance of three thousand Scottish troops against Spain. Raleigh had been an opponent of Essex, who had sought support from James and attached himself to his fortunes. And what was worse, he had an enemy, though he scarcely knew it, in the person of a man who had opposed Essex much more strongly than he, but who had, even before the Queen's death, assured James of his absolute devotion. This was Robert Cecil, who feared Raleigh's ambition and ability.

Raleigh was in the West of England when the Queen died, and could not at once join in the great rush northwards to meet King James, which emptied London of all its nobility. By the time he started, with a large retinue, to wait on the King, he had already received a kind of command not to do so, in the shape of one of the orders dispensing the recipient from attendance on the King, which James had sent in blank to Cecil, to be filled in with the names of those whom Cecil thought he should keep at a distance. James received Raleigh ungraciously, and at once told him, with a bad pun on his name, that he had been prejudiced against him: "On my soul, man, I have heard but rawly of thee." A few weeks later he was deprived (though not without compensation) of the office of Captain of the Guard, which was given to a Scotchman, Sir Thomas Erskine; and within the same month he was ordered immediately to give up to the Bishop of Durham the town palace of that See, which he had occupied, and on which he had spent great sums of money.

At last, one day in July 1603, as he was standing ready to ride out with the King, he was arrested and imprisoned on a charge of high treason. This was the beginning of a long series of base proceedings against this eminent man, who had deserved so well of his country. He was a prisoner in the Tower for thirteen years, and the persecution ended only with the judicial murder which was committed when, in 1618, after making the most beautiful speech ever heard from the scaffold, he laid his head on the block with incomparable courage and calm dignity.

It is difficult for us to-day to understand how a man of Raleigh's worth could at that time be the best-hated man in England. For us he is simply, as Gardiner has expressed it, "the man who had more genius than all the Privy Council put together;" or, as Gosse has called him, "the figure which takes the same place in the field of action which Shakespeare takes in that of imagination and Bacon in that of thought." But that he was generally hated at the time of his imprisonment is certain.

Many disliked him as the enemy of Essex. It was said that in Essex's last hours Raleigh had jeered at him. Raleigh himself wrote in 1618:—

"It is said I was a persecutor of my Lord of Essex; that I puffed out tobacco in disdain when he was on the scaffold. But I take God to witness I shed tears for him when he died. I confess I was of a contrary faction, but I knew he was a noble gentleman. Those that set me up against him [evidently Cecil] did afterwards set themselves against me."

But what mattered the falseness of the accusation if it was believed? And there were other, much less reasonable, grounds of hatred. From one of Raleigh's letters, written in the last days of Queen Elizabeth, we learn that the tavern-keepers throughout the country held him responsible for a tax imposed on them, which was in fact due solely to the Queen's rapacity. In this letter he prays Cecil to prevail on Elizabeth to remit the tax, for, says he: "I cannot live, nor show my face out of my doors, without it, nor dare ride through the towns where these taverners dwell." It seems as if his very greatness had marked him out for universal hatred; and, being conscious of his worth, he would not stoop to a truckling policy.

There was much that was popularly winning about the tall, vigorous, rather large-boned Raleigh, with his bright complexion and his open expression; but, like a true son of the Renaissance, he challenged dislike by his pride and magnificence. His dress was always splendid, and he loved, like a Persian Shah or Indian Rajah of our day, to cover himself, down to his shoes, with the most precious jewels. When he was arrested in 1603, he had gems to the value of £4000 (about £20,000 in modern money) on his breast, and when he was thrown into prison for the last time in 1618, his pockets were found full of jewels and golden ornaments which he had hastily stripped off his dress.

He was worshipped by those who had served under him; they valued his qualities of heart as well as his energy and intellect. But the crowd, whom he treated with disdain, and the courtiers and statesmen with whom he had competed for Elizabeth's favour, saw nothing in him but matchless effrontery and unscrupulousness. In spite of the favour he enjoyed, his rivals prevented his ever attaining any of the highest posts. On those naval expeditions in which he most distinguished himself, his place was always second in command. He was baulked even in the desire which he cherished during Elizabeth's later years for a place in the Privy Council.

He was now over fifty, and aged before his time. His untrustworthy friend, Lord Cobham, was suspected of complicity in Watson's Catholic plot; and this suspicion extended to Raleigh, who was thought to have been a party to intrigues for the dethronement of James in favour of his kinswoman, Arabella Stuart. He was tried for high treason; and as the law then stood in England, any man accused of such a crime was as good as lost, however innocent he might be. "A century later," says Mr. Gardiner, "Raleigh might well have smiled at the evidence which was brought against him." Then the law was as cruel as it was unjust. The accused was considered guilty until he proved his innocence; no advocate was allowed to plead his cause; unprepared, at a moment's notice, he had to refute charges which had been carefully accumulated and marshalled against him during a long period. That a man should be suspected of such an enormity as desiring to bring Spanish armies on to the free soil of England was enough to deprive him at once of all sympathy. Little wonder that Raleigh, a few days after his indictment, tried to commit suicide. His famous letter to his wife, written before the attempt, gives consummate expression to a great man's despair in face of a destiny which he does not fear, yet cannot master.