GEORGE BRANDES (continued 14)

Lady Essex, who was not the woman for half measures, preferred to make certain of Overbury once for all, and was determined that he should never leave the Tower alive. For this purpose she again applied to Mrs. Turner, who was well supplied with means serviceable to the occasion. The first thing necessary was to assure themselves of the man to whose immediate care the prisoner was intrusted. Lady Essex applied to Sir Thomas Monson, Master of the Tower Armoury, and through his influence Helwys was induced to dismiss Overbury's attendant and supply his place with Richard Weston, a former servant of Anne Turner.

This man was instructed by Mrs. Turner to meet Lady Essex at Whitehall, and to receive from her a little phial whose contents were to be mixed with the prisoner's food. Meeting Helwys on his way to Overbury's cell, and supposing him to be initiated into the secret, Weston consulted him as to the best way of administering the poison. Helwys, horror-stricken, prevailed upon him to throw away the contents of the phial. He was in too much awe of the Howard family to venture an accusation, and Weston at his instigation told Lady Essex that the poison had been duly administered, and that the prisoner's health was failing in consequence. Overbury was, in truth, suffering greatly from the frustration of his hopes of release, and he naïvely requested Rochester to send him an emetic in order that the King, hearing of his sickness, might be moved to compassion. It is not known what kind of medicament Rochester sent, nor whether he was aware of Lady Essex's attempt, but he seems to have played his own hand on this occasion.

On finding that Overbury, in spite of his steadily failing health, still continued to live, Lady Frances renewed her activity. Rochester was sending sweetmeats, jellies, and wines to the prisoner, and Lady Essex mixed poison with all these condiments, quite unconscious of the fact that Helwys, now upon the alert, took care that none of them should reach the prisoner. Losing all patience, she looked round for some more certain means than this poison, which worked with such astonishing and irritating deliberation. Learning that the apothecary Franklin was attending Overbury, she bribed his boy to give the sick man a poisoned injection. This was done, and the prisoner died in the Tower on the following day. Northampton immediately spread about a report that Sir Thomas Overbury had by no means led such a secluded life in the Tower as was generally supposed, but had by his dissolute life there contracted a disease of which he died. The rumour was generally believed, but that some suspicions were entertained can be seen in the letters of the times. John Chamberlain, writing to Sir Dudley Carleton on the 14th October 1613, speaks of Overbury's death as being caused by this disease, "or something worse."

Thus the last obstacle was cleared from the path which led this brilliant pair to the altar. Lady Frances was happy, and much farther removed from any feeling of remorse than Lady Macbeth. The King was full of affection for her, and, in order that she might not be wanting her title of Countess, Rochester was made Earl of Somerset. The wedding was celebrated with inordinate pomp on the 26th December 1613. The bride had the assurance to appear with maidenly hair unbound upon her shoulders. John Chamberlain, writing to Mrs. Alice Carleton, December 30th, says, "She was married in her hair, and led to the chapel by her bridemen, a Duke of Saxony that is here, and the Earl of Northampton, her great-uncle." The wedding was celebrated in the Chapel Royal, in the same place and by the same bishop who had solemnised the previous marriage. King, Queen, and Archbishop were all present, not to mention those of the nobility who wished to stand well with the King and his favourite, and rich gifts were brought by all. Gondomar, wishing to show himself attentive to so highly favoured a pair, sent them some magnificent jewels. The City of London, the Merchant Adventurers, the East India Company, and the Customs sent each their present of precious metals of great value. Gold, silver, and jewels were showered upon them throughout the first half of January 1614. Bacon, though personally no admirer of Somerset, naturally did not hold back. It is very significantly remarked in a letter from John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, December 23, 1613, "Sir Francis Bacon prepares a masque to honour the marriage, which will stand him in about £2000, and though he have been offered some help by the House, and especially by Mr. Solicitor, Sir Henry Yelverton, who would have sent him £500, yet he would not accept it, but offers them the whole charge with the honour." A few years later it is Bacon who conducts the poisoning case against Rochester.

The day following the wedding the King sent a message to the Lord Mayor, inviting him to arrange a fête for Lord and Lady Somerset. The City vainly endeavoured to excuse itself on the ground of insufficient space, but the King himself suggested a remedy, and it was arranged that the guests should go in procession from Westminster to the City, the gentlemen on horseback and the ladies in carriages. The bride was pleased to consider her carriage suitable to the occasion, but not being satisfied with her horses, she sent to borrow Lord Winwood's. He, replying that it did not beseem so great a lady to borrow, gallantly begged her acceptance of the horses as a gift.

Macaulay has likened this Court to that of Nero, and Swinburne has added that these celebrations recall the bridals of Sporus and Locusta. Chapman had already inscribed to Rochester two of the dedicatory sonnets which accompanied the last books of his translation of the Iliad, and filled them with absurdly exaggerated praise of the Viscount's "heroic virtues." He now wrote his "Andromeda Liberata" in glorification of the nuptials, and on his being attacked on that score, he retorted with his exceedingly naïve "Defence of Perseus and Andromeda."

Life with Lady Frances could have no beneficial effect upon Somerset's character. Nothing was magnificent enough for him, and he was constantly importing new fashions in order to please his master and his wife. That ingenuously moralising historian, Arthur Wilson, complains bitterly of his appearance, his curled and perfumed locks, smooth shaven face and bare neck, and the golden embroideries lavished upon his attire. His only occupation was to solicit estates and money of the King. The subjects supplied him handsomely, for every petitioner paid tribute to Somerset. How much he received in this manner is uncertain, but he spent not less than £90,000 a year. It may be said to his credit, that he never, as did the later favourites, sought to tamper with the law, and he now and then displayed some generosity, but it was the exactions of his Howard connections which ruined him. The Council's most honourable members, amongst whom was Shakespeare's patron, Pembroke, saw with indignation that he predisposed the King in favour of their rivals.

His successor appeared in 1614. George Villiers, a young, handsome man of lively disposition, was promoted step by step, yet not too hastily, for fear of wounding Somerset's feelings. His presence at Court, however, was exceedingly disagreeable to the latter, who treated his rival with cold insolence, and seized every opportunity of humbling him. Somerset's passionate temper and arrogant disposition soon betrayed him into treating the King with similar superciliousness. He was rebuked by James, and a temporary reconciliation was effected; but how far Carr was from the enjoyment of a clear conscience is shown by his soliciting a general pardon, such as Wolsey had received from Henry VIII., from the King at this time, which was to include every possible offence, not forgetting murder. This, he pointed out to James, was in case his enemies should attempt to destroy him by false accusations after the King's death. James was willing, but Lord Ellesmere refused to apply the great seal to the document in question. The King's wrath was great but unavailing. Ellesmere fell upon his knees, but refused to affix the seal.

Soon after this Somerset experienced the need of this comprehensive absolution which he had failed to secure. The apothecary's boy, who had administered the injection to Overbury, fell dangerously ill at Flushing, and, wishing to ease his burdened soul, confessed the murder to Lord Winwood. Helwys was examined, Weston was examined, and Lord and Lady Somerset were soon implicated in the case. As soon as Somerset heard that he was accused, he quitted the King, with whom he was staying at Royston, and started for London in order to clear himself. The King, by this time, was profoundly weary of his old favourite, and entirely taken up by his new. To give some idea of James's dissimulation, we will quote Sir Anthony Weldon's account, as an eye-witness, of the parting between the King and Somerset. "The Earle when he kissed his hand, the King hung about his neck, slabbering his cheeks, saying, 'For God's sake, when shall I see thee again? On my soul, I shall neither eat nor sleep until you come again.' The Earle told him, on Monday (this being on the Friday). 'For God's sake, let me,' said the King. 'Shall I, shall I;' then lolled about his neck. 'Then, for God's sake, give thy lady this kiss for me.' In the same manner at the stayres' head, at the middle of the stayres, and at the stayres' foot. The Earl was not in his coach when the King used these very words, 'I shall never see his face more.'"

Short work was made of the subordinate culprits. Mrs. Turner, Weston, Helwys, and the apothecary Franklin, were all declared guilty and hanged. The Countess bore testimony to her husband's innocence, and he went to the Tower with the collar of the Garter and the George about his neck. He threatened that if he were brought to trial he would betray secrets which contained an accusation against the King—contemporary letters show that this was understood to mean that he would confess to having poisoned Prince Henry at the King's instigation; but he abandoned this accusation later, and conducted his defence with dignity, denying all complicity in the murder. The Countess was less self-possessed. The judgment hall was filled with spectators, and the Earl of Essex amongst them was seated exactly opposite her. As the accusation was read, she trembled and turned pale, and when Weston's name was reached, she covered her face with her fan. When, according to custom, she was asked if she acknowledged herself guilty, she could but answer, Yes. She was condemned to death, and to the question whether she had anything further to add, replied that she would say nothing to palliate her guilt, but prayed the King's mercy. Somerset was also unanimously declared guilty.

The King pardoned them both. He could hardly send to the scaffold the man who had so long been his most intimate friend, neither could he well despatch thither the daughter of his Chancellor of the Exchequer. But although Somerset steadily maintained his innocence, both he and his wife were sent to the Tower.

In the letters written at the time of the trial, as much mention is made of Sir George Villiers as of Somerset. The new favourite has been ill for some time, "not without suspicion of smallpox, which if it had fallen out actum erat de amicitia. But it proves otherwise, and we say there is much casting about how to make him a great man, and that he shall now be made of the Garter," &c.

He was soon made Cupbearer, Chamberlain, Master of the Horse, Marquis of Buckingham, and Keeper of the Great Seal, and he retained his pernicious influence well into the reign of Charles the First. It is highly characteristic of James that he was now as anxious to procure Villiers Raleigh's old estate, Sherborne, from the imprisoned Somerset as he had been to wrest it from the imprisoned Raleigh for Somerset. He must have regarded it as a lawful "morrowing gift," so inextricably had it become associated with a rising favourite in his mind. Somerset was given to understand that he would obtain a free pardon, together with the restitution of the rest of his properties, if he would secure the now all-powerful Villiers' protection by relinquishing Sherborne in his favour. On his obstinately refusing, he and Lady Somerset were left to languish for six long years in the Tower.[1]

VII

CONTEMPT OF WOMEN—TROILUS AND CRESSIDA

In order to give a complete picture, it was necessary to trace events down to the years in which external happenings ceased to work upon Shakespeare's mind. He died in the same year that the Lady Arabella perished in the Tower, and when the scandal of the Somerset trial was beginning to fade from the public mind. It is obviously impossible to point to any one cause which could have made an especially deep impression on his inner life. All we can say with certainty is, that the general atmosphere of the times, of the corrupt condition of morals here described, could hardly fail to leave some mark on a disposition which, just at this time, was susceptible and irritable to the highest degree. If, as we maintain, there now ensued a period during which his melancholy was prone to dwell upon the darkest side of life; if he shows, in these years, a sickly tendency to imbibe poison from everything; and if all his observation and experience seem to result in a contempt of mankind, so did the general condition of society afford ample nourishment for the mood of scorn for human nature.

In the merely external, Shakespeare's life cannot at this time have undergone any great catastrophe. He was now (1607) forty-three years of age. As soon as the play was over, between five and six of an afternoon, he stepped into one of the Thames boats and was set across the river to his house, where his books and work awaited him. He studied much, making himself familiar with the works of his contemporaries, plunging anew into Plutarch, reading Chaucer and Gower, and pondering over More's Utopia. He worked as hard as ever. Neither the rehearsal in the morning nor the play at mid-day had power to weary him. He read through old dramatic manuscripts to see if new treatment could revive them into use, and returned to long-laid-by manuscripts of his own to work upon them afresh.

He attended to business at the same time, received the rents of his houses at Stratford, collected his tithes from the same place, and watched the lawsuits in which the purchase of these tithes had involved him. He had obtained the object of his existence, so far as the possession of property was concerned; but never had he been so downcast and dispirited, never had he felt so keenly the emptiness of life.

So long as Shakespeare was young, the general condition of society and the ways and worth of men had troubled him less. Then, except for the feeling of belonging to a despised caste and the increasing spread of Puritanism, he was at peace with his surroundings. Now he saw more sharply the true outlines of his times and his world, and perceived more clearly that eternal infirmity of human nature, which at all times only waits for a propitious climate in order to develop itself.

The last work which had lain ready on his table was Antony and Cleopatra. He had there, for the second time, given his impression of the subversion of a world.

There was a pendant to this war of the East (which was in reality waged for Cleopatra's sake), a war fought by all the countries of the Mediterranean for the possession of a loose woman; the most famous of all wars, the old Trojan war, set going by a "cuckold and carried on for a whore," so it will shortly be described by a scandalous buffoon, whom Shakespeare uses, so to speak, in his own name. Here was stuff for a tragicomedy of right bitter sort.

From childhood he, and every one else, had been filled with the fame and glory of this war. All its heroes were models of bravery, magnanimity, wisdom, friendship, and fidelity, as if such things existed! For the first time in his life he feels a desire to mock—to shout "Bah!" straight out of his heart—to turn the wrong side out, the true side.

Menelaus and Helen—what a ridiculous couple! The wretched head of horned cattle moves heaven and earth, causes thousands of men to be slain, and all that he may have his damaged beauty back again.[1] Menelaus stood too low for his satire, however. Shakespeare himself had never felt thus. Neither was it in his humour to portray a woman who, like Helen, had openly left one man for another, a husband for a lover—there was none of woman's special duplicity in that. The transfer from one to another, which alone was of interest to him, in her case was already past and gone. Helen's destiny is settled before the drama begins. There is no play, no inner variety in her character, no dramatic situation between her in Troy and Menelaus without.

But in the old legends of Troy which sagas and folk-tales had handed down to him, he found, in miniature, the plot whereon the whole war turned. Cressida, a rejuvenated Helen; Troilus, the simpleton who loved her, and whom she betrayed; and round about them grouped all those archetypes of subtlety, wisdom, and strength—that venerable old twaddler Nestor, and that sly fox Ulysses, &c. Here was something which urged him on to representation. Here was a plot which chimed in with his mood.

Shakespeare had no interest in delineating that bellâtre, Prince Paris; he had felt him as little as he had Menelaus. But he had many a time felt as Troilus did—the honest soul, the honourable fool, who was simple enough to believe in a woman's constancy. And he knew well, too well, that Lady Cressida, with the alluring ways, the nimble wit, the warm blood, speaking lawful passion with (to not too true an ear) the lawful modesty of speech. She would rather be desired than confer, would rather be loved than love, says "yes" with a "no" yet upon her lips, and flames up at the least suspicion of her truth. Not that she is false. Oh, no! why false? We believe in her as her lover believes in her, and as she believes in herself—until she leaves him for the Greek camp. Then she has scarcely turned her back upon him than she loses her heart to the first she meets, and her constancy fails at the first proof to which it is put.

All his life through these two forms had preoccupied his imagination. In Lucretia, he coupled Troilus with Hector among Trojan heroes. In the fourth act of the Merchant of Venice, he made Lorenzo say:

"In such a night. Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls, And sighed his soul towards the Grecian tents Where Cressid lay."

In Henry V., Pistol included Doll Tearsheet among "Cressid's kind," making Doll doubly ridiculous by classing her with the Trojan maid of far-famed charm. In Much Ado About Nothing; (Act v.), Benedict called Troilus "the first employer of Pandars." In As You Like It (Act iv.), Rosalind jested about him, and yet yielded him a certain recognition. Protesting that no man ever yet died for love, she said, "Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club, yet did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love." In Twelfth Night and in All's Well' that Ends Well, the Fool and Lafeu both jested about Pandarus and his ill-famed zeal in bringing Troilus and Cressida together.

Slowly, like the Hamlet tradition, this subject had been growing ripe in Shakespeare's mind. It had hitherto lived in his imagination in much the same form in which it had been handled by his compatriots. By Chaucer, first and foremost, who in his Troilus and Cressida (about 1360) had translated, elaborated, and enlarged Boccaccio's beautiful poem, Filostrato. But neither Chaucer nor any other Englishman who had translated or reproduced the subject (such as Lydgate, 1460, who restored Guido delle Columne's Historia Trojana, or Caxton, who in 1471 published a translation of Raoul le Fevre's Recueil des Histoires de Troyes) had found in it any material for satire. Especially had none of its earlier elaborators found any fault with the character of Cressida. Not the poets once. Chaucer founded his heroine in all essentials upon Boccaccio's. He, who was the first to gather the material into a poetic whole, had no intention of presenting his heroine in an unfavourable light. He wished to give expression, as he openly declares, to his own devotion to his lady-love in his description of Troilus's passion for Cressida. The old Trouvere, Benoit de St. Maure, and his Histoire de la Guerre de Troie (about 1160), was undoubtedly his model. It is from him he received the impression that Griseida (into whom he transforms Benoit's Briseida) gradually falls a victim to the seductions of Diomedes, in whose company she leaves Troy, and little by little grows untrue to Troilus. He adds a stanza to this effect, on the inconstancy of women.[2] It was not to be expected that Boccaccio should kneel before women with the platonic love and devout worship of Dante and Petrarch. Beatrice is a mystical, Laura an earthly ideal. Griseida is a young lady from the Court of Naples, such as it was then. A young, lovable, and frail woman of flesh and blood. But only frail, never base, and very far from being a coquette. Boccaccio never forgets that he has dedicated the poem to his love and that she also left the place where they had dwelt together, for one where he durst not follow her. He says clearly that in the portrayal of Griseida's charms he has drawn a picture of his love, but he refrains with consummate tact from driving the comparison further.

Chaucer, as little as Boccaccio, found anything in the relations of the lovers to satirise. He intends, to the best of his abilities, to prove their love as innocent and lawful as possible. He paints it with a naïve and enraptured simplicity, which proves how far he is from mockery.[3] He does not even rave over Cressida's faithlessness to Troilus; she is excused, she trembles and hesitates before she falls. Inconstancy is forced upon her by the overwhelming might of hard circumstance.

There is nothing in these two poets that can compare with the passionate heat and hatred, the boundless bitterness with which Shakespeare delineates and pursues his Cressida. His mood is the more remarkable that he in no wise paints her as unlovable or corrupt; she is merely a shallow, frivolous, sensual, pleasure-loving coquette.

She does little, on the whole, to call for such severity of judgment. She is a mere child and beginner in comparison with Cleopatra, for instance, who, for all that, is not so unmercifully condemned. But Shakespeare has aggravated and pointed every circumstance until Cressida becomes odious, and rouses only aversion. The change from love to treachery, from Troilus to Diomedes, is in no earlier poet effected with such rapidity. Whenever Shakespeare expresses by the mouth of one or another of his characters the estimate in which he intends his audience to hold her, one is astounded by the bitterness of the hatred he discloses. It is especially noticeable in the scene (Act iv.) in which Cressida comes to the Greek camp and is greeted by the kings with a kiss.

At this point Cressida has as yet offended in nothing. She has, out of pure, vehement love for him, passed such a night with Troilus as Juliet did with Romeo, persuaded to it by Pandarus, as Juliet was by her nurse. Now she accepts and returns the kiss wherewith the Greek chieftains bid her welcome. We may remark, in parenthesis, that at that time there was no impropriety in such a greeting. In William Brenchley Rye's "England as seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First," are found, under the heading "England and Englishmen," the following notes by Samuel Riechel, a merchant from Ulm:—"Item, when a foreigner or an inhabitant goes to a citizen's house on business, or is invited as a guest, and having entered therein, he is received by the master of the house, the lady, or the daughter, and by them welcomed; he has even the right to take them by the arm and kiss them, which is the custom of the country; and if any one does not do so, it is regarded and imputed as ignorance and ill-breeding on his part."

For all that, Ulysses, who sees through her at the first glance, breaks out on occasion of this kiss which Cressida returns:

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

So Shakespeare causes his heroine to be described, and doubtless it is his own last word about her. Immediately before her he had portrayed Cleopatra. When we remember the position occupied in his drama by the Egyptian queen, whom he, for all that, has stamped as the most dangerous of all dangerous coquettes, we can only marvel at the distance his spiritual nature has traversed since then.

There was in Shakespeare's disposition, as we have already remarked, a deep and extraordinary tendency to submissive admiration and worship. Many of his flowing lyrics spring from this source. Recall his humility of attitude before the objects of this admiration, before Henry V., for example, and his adoration for the friend in the Sonnets. We still find this need of giving lyrical and ecstatic expression to his hero-worship in Antony and Cleopatra. He by no means undertakes a defence of the desolating temptress, but with what glamour he surrounds her! What eulogies he lavishes upon her! She stands in an aureole of the adulation of all the other characters in the drama. At the time Shakespeare wrote this great tragedy, he had still so much of romantic enthusiasm remaining to him that he found it natural to let her live and die gloriously. Let be that she was a sorceress, still she fascinates.

What a change! Shakespeare, who had hitherto worshipped women, has become a misogamist. This mood, forgotten since his early youth, rises up again in hundredfold strength, and his very soul overflows in scorn for the sex.

What is the cause? Has anything befallen him—anything new? Upon what and whom does he think? Does he speak out of new and recent experience, or is it the old sorrow from the time of the Sonnets, of which he made use in the construction of Cleopatra's character, and is this the same grief which has taken new shape in his mind and is turning sour? is it this which has grown increasingly bitter until it corrodes?

There are two types of artist soul. There is the one which needs many varying experiences and constantly changing models, and which instantly gives a poetic form to every fresh incident. There is the other which requires amazingly few outside elements to fertilise it, and for which a single life circumstance, inscribed with sufficient force, can furnish a whole wealth of ever-changing thought and modes of expression. Sören Kierkegaard among writers, and Max Klinger among painters, are both great examples of the latter type.

To which did Shakespeare belong? His many-sidedness and fertility is incontrovertible, and every particular points to the use of a multiplicity of models. But for all that, his groups of feminine characters can frequently be traced back to an original type, and therefore, most likely, to a single model. When one momentous incident of a poet's life is known, we are very apt to relate to it everything in his works which could possibly have any connection with it. In this manner the French literary and critical world most obstinately found traces of Alfred de Musset's life with George Sand in every expression of melancholy or complaint of desolation in his poems. In his biography of his brother, however, Paul de Musset has revealed the fact that the "December Night," which seems so obvious a supplement to the "May Night" that turns upon George Sand, was really written in quite another spirit, to a totally different woman. Also, the character delineated in the "Letter to Lamartine," which was generally believed to be that of the famous poetess, had in reality nothing whatever to do with her.

It is quite possible, therefore, that this last woman's character, instead of being only a variant of the Cleopatra type, was a product of a new, fiery, and scorching impression of feminine inconstancy and worthlessness. We are too entirely ignorant of the circumstances of the poet's life to venture any decided opinion, all we can say is, that incidents and novel experiences are not absolutely necessary as an explanation. There is a remote possibility that the first sketch of the play was already written in 1603, in which case it would be more than likely that the dark lady was once more his prototype. On the other hand, it may be, as already suggested, that in a productive soul one circumstance will take the place of many, and an experience which at first seemed wholly tragic may, in the rapid inner development of genius, come to wholly change its character. He has suffered under it; it has sucked his heart's blood and left him a beaten man on his path through life. He has sought to embody it in serious and worthy forms, until suddenly it stands before him as a burlesque. His misery no longer seems a cruel destiny, but a well-merited punishment for immoderate stupidity, and this bitter mood has sought relief in such scornful laughter as that whose discord strikes so harshly in Troilus and Cressida.

We can imagine that Shakespeare began by worshipping his lady-love, complaining of her coldness and hardness, celebrating her fingers in song, cursing her faithlessness, and feeling himself driven nearly wild with grief at the false position in which she had placed him; this is the standpoint of the Sonnets. In the course of years the fever had stormed itself out, but the memory of the enchantment was still visibly fresh, and his mind pictured the loved one as a marvellous phenomenon, half queen, half gipsy, alluring and repellant, true and false, strong and weak, a siren and a mystery; this is the standpoint of Antony and Cleopatra. Then, possibly, when life had sobered him down, when he had cooled, as we all do cool in the hardening ice of experience, he suddenly and sharply realised the insanity of an exotic enthusiasm for so worthless an object. He looks upon this condition, which invariably begins with self-deception and must of necessity end in disillusionment, as a disgraceful and tremendous absurdity; and his wrath over wasted feelings and wasted time and suffering, over the degradation and humiliation of its self-deception, and ultimately the treason itself, seeks final and supreme relief in the outburst, "What a farce!" which is in itself the germ of Troilus and Cressida.

VIII

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA—THE HISTORICAL MATERIAL.

In the twenty-fourth book of the Iliad Homer makes his solitary mention of Troilus as a son whom Priam had lost before the opening of the poem. The old King says:

"O me, accursed man, All my good sons are gone, my light the shades Cimmerian Have swallowed from me. I have lost Mestor, surnamed the Fair, Troilus, that ready knight at arms, that made his field repair Ever so prompt and joyfully."

This is all the great old world poet says of the king's son, whose fame in the Middle Ages outshone Hector's own. This brief mention of an early death stirred the imagination and set fancy at work. The cyclic poets expanded the hint and developed Troilus into a handsome youth who fell by Achilles' lance. It had become the custom under Imperial Rome to derive the empire from the Trojans, and the theory gave birth to many fabrications, professing to emanate from eye-witnesses of the war.

Yet it was not before the time of Constantine the Great, that a description was given which quite displaced Homer during the Middle Ages. This was Dictys Cretensis' book, De Bello Trojano, translated from the original Greek into Latin. The translator, a certain Quintus Septimius, informs us that Dictys was a brother in arms of Idomeneus, and at his prince's suggestion wrote this book in Phœnician characters, and afterwards caused it to be buried with him. An earthquake in the time of Nero brought it to light. The translator is evidently simple enough to believe in the truth of this account. A more daring forgery was issued about 635, after the fall of the Western Empire of Rome. The author is supposed to be a certain Dares Phrygius, who was one of Hector's counsellors, and who wrote the Iliad before Homer. The title of this book also is De Bello Trojano, and it professes to have been translated into Latin by Cornelius Nepos, who is said to have found the manuscript at Athens, "where, in his day, Homer was considered half mad" because he had depicted gods and men as carrying on a war with one another. Troilus is the most prominent hero of the book, which is a wretched compilation of far-fetched reminiscences.

Dares, however, became the fountain-head for all mediæval story-tellers, first and foremost among them being Benoit de St. Maure, troubadour to Henry II. of England. Of his poem, containing 30,000 verses, only fragments have ever been printed. As a genuine Trouvere of the early half of the twelfth century, he has adorned his ancient material with sumptuous descriptions of towns, palaces, and accoutrements. He enters, so far as he is able, into the spiritual life of his hero, and supplies him with what, according to the notions of his times, he could not possibly lack—a love motive. He represents Briseis, Achilles' vaunted love, as the daughter of Kalchas, whom, following the example of Dares, he makes a Trojan. Briseida, who is beloved by Troilus, returns to Troy after her father goes over to the Greeks. When Kalchas wishes to regain his daughter, she is exchanged, as in Shakespeare's drama, for the prisoner Antenor. Diomedes is sent by the Greeks to escort her, and Briseida falls a victim to his seductive arts. Many of the incidents in Shakespeare's play are to be found in Benoit—that Diomedes is experienced in women, for example; that Briseis gives him a favour wherewith to adorn his lance; that he dismounts Troilus and sends his horse to his lady-love, and that Troilus inveighs against her broken faith, &c.

Now it can be traced how, in the further development of the theme, one writer after another adds some feature which Shakespeare in his turn still further elaborates. Guido de Colonna (or delle Columne), a judge at Messina in 1287, retranslates Benoit de St. Maure into barbarous Latin, making no acknowledgment of his source, and transforming Achilles into a raw, bloodthirsty barbarian.

Boccaccio, who prefers significant names, and the title of whose poem, Filostrato, signifies "one struck to earth by love," changes Briseida into Cryseida (thus in old editions), in order that her name may mean "the golden," and he it is who adds Pandarus, the "all-giver," who aids Troilus in his love affairs. He is Cryseida's kinsman and is evidently sympathetic all through.[1]

It is Chaucer who first submits the character of Pandarus to an important change, and makes it the transition point of the Pandarus we find in Shakespeare. In his poem Troilus's young friend has become the elderly kinsman of Creseyde, and he brings the young pair together, mostly out of looseness. It is he who persuades the young maiden and leads her astray by means of lying impostures. It was not Chaucer's intention, as it was Shakespeare's, to make the old fellow odious. His rôle is not carried out with the cynical and repulsive lowness of Shakespeare's character. Chaucer endeavours to ward off any painful impression by making the shameless old rascal the wit of his poem. He did not achieve his object; his readers saw only the procurer in Pandarus, whose name became thenceforward a by-word in the English language, and it was as such that Shakespeare drew the character in downright, unmistakable disgust.[2]

We have yet other sources, Latin, French, and English, for the details of the drama. From Ovid's Metamorphoses, for example (which Shakespeare must have known from childhood), he took the idea of making Ajax almost an idiot in his conceited stupidity. It is in the third book of the Metamorphoses that Ulysses, fighting with Ajax for Achilles' weapon, overwhelms his opponent with biting sarcasms.[3] Shakespeare found the name of Thersites in the same book, with a word concerning his rôle as lampooner of princes.

We may doubt whether Shakespeare knew Lydgate's Book of Troy. Most of his details with regard to the siege are taken from an old writing translated from the French and published by Wynkyn de Worde in 1503. Here, for example, is the parade of heroes, the talk of King Neoptolemus being no son of Achilles, and the corrupted names of the six gates of Troy—Dardane, Timbria, Helias, Chetas, Troyen, and Antenorides. Here also he would find the name of Hectors horse, Galathea, the archer who calls upon the Greeks, the bastard Margarelon, Cassandra's warning to Hector, the glove Cressida gives away, and Troilus's idea that a man is not called upon to be merciful in war, but should take a victory as he may.[4]

We cannot tell if Shakespeare was further indebted to some old dramatic writings, whereof only the names have survived to us. In 1515, a "Komedy" called the Story of Troylus and Pandor was played before Henry VIII. On New Year's Day, 1572, a play about Ajax and Ulisses was performed at Windsor Castle, and another in 1584 concerning Agamemnon and Ulisses.[5] In Henslowe's Daybook for April and May 1599 we see that the poets Dekker and Henry Chettle (Dickers and Harey Cheattel, in his amusing orthography) wrote a piece, at his invitation, for the Lord Admiral's troupe, Troeyles and creasseday. In May he lends them a sum of money on it, changing its title to A tragedy about Agamemnon. It is finally entered at the Stationers' Hall in February 1603 as a piece entitled Troilus and Cresseda, "as it was played by the Lord Chamberlain's men"[6] (Shakespeare's company). The fact that in Shakespeare's drama, as we have it, rhyme is introduced in various parts of the dialogue, and several other details of versification, seems to point to the possibility that the so-called piece was in reality Shakespeare's first sketch of the play. It is one of Fleay's tediously worked out theories that the drama was produced in three different parts, with an interval of from twelve to thirteen years between each. He is quite regardless of the fact that the parts are absolutely inseparable, and is evidently entirely innocent of the manner of growth of poems. He also totally ignores such important evidence as that of the preface to the oldest edition, 1609, which positively asserts that the piece has never hitherto been played. It is, of course, possible that this edition, like most of its kind, was unauthorised, but even then the writer of the preface would scarcely lie about a fact which could be so easily verified, and which, moreover, he was not in the least interested in falsifying.

IX

SHAKESPEARE AND CHAPMAN—SHAKESPEARE AND HOMER

We have now apparently exhausted the literary sources of this mysterious and so little understood work. But we have not, for all that, solved the fundamental question which has occupied so many brains and pens. Was it Shakespeare's intention to ridicule Homer? Did he know Homer?

To a Dane, Troilus and Cressida recalls the mockery Holberg's Ulysses von Ithacia makes of the Homeric material, just as the Ulysses reminds us of Shakespeare's play. Troilus and Cressida seems to have represented to the English poet much what Holberg's play did to him, a satire, namely, on the absurdities the Gothic and Anglo-Saxon understanding (i.e. narrow-mindedness) found in Homer. It is sufficiently remarkable that Shakespeare should have written a travesty which could, in spite of many reservations, be classed with Ulysses von Ithacia. As far as Holberg is concerned, the explanation is simple enough. His is the taste of the enlightened age, and the ancient civilisation's noble naïveté viewed in the light of dry rationalism, filled him with amazement and laughter. But what has Shakespeare to do with rationalism? His was the very time of the renaissance of that old world civilisation, the moment of its resurrection. How came he to scorn it?

The general working of the public mind towards the ancient Greeks had prompted Elizabeth to write a commentary on Plato and to translate the Dialogues of Socrates; but Shakespeare's knowledge of Greek was defective, and thus it was that he, as playwright, represented the popular trend, in contradistinction to the numerous other poets, who, like Ben Jonson, prided themselves on their erudition.

Moreover, like the Romans, and subsequently the Italians and French, the Englishmen of his day believed themselves to be descended from those ancient Trojans, whom Virgil, as true Roman, had glorified at the expense of the Greeks. The England of Shakespeare's time took a pride in her Trojan forefathers, and we find evidence in other of his works that he, as English patriot, sided with the Trojans in the old battles of Ilion, and was, consequently, prejudiced against the Greek heroes. In my opinion, however, all this has little to do with the point at issue. We have already found it probable that Chapman was the poet whose intimacy with Pembroke roused Shakespeare's jealousy, making him feel slighted and neglected, and causing him so much melancholy suffering. I am not ignorant of the arguments which have been brought forward in support of the theory that the rival poet was not Chapman but Daniel, nor of what Miss Charlotte Stopes and G. A. Leigh have to say on the subject of Minto and Tyler.[1]. I do not, however, consider that they have been able to refute the strong evidence in favour of its being no other than Chapman who was the poet of Shakespeare's Sonnets 78-86.

In the year 1598 Chapman had just published the first seven books of his Iliad, namely, the first, second, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh of Homer. The remaining books, followed by a complete Odyssey, were not published until 1611, two years after the first appearance of Troilus and Cressida. To render the comparatively unknown Homer into good English verse was an achievement worthy of the acknowledgments Chapman received. His translation is to this day, in spite of its faults, the best that England possesses. Keats himself has written a sonnet in praise of it.

How great a reputation Chapman enjoyed as a dramatist may be seen in the dedication of John Webster's tragedy The White Divel (1612), at the close of which he says: "Detraction is the sworn friend to ignorance. For mine owne part, I have ever truly cherisht my good opinion of other men's worthy labours, especially of that full and haightened stile of Maister Chapman. The labour'd and understanding workes of Maister Johnson: The no less worthy composures of the both worthy and excellent Maister Beamont and Maister Fletcher: and lastly (without wrong last to be named), the right happy and copious industry of Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Decker and Mr. Heywood." As will have been noticed, Chapman's name heads the list, while Shakespeare's comes at the bottom in conjunction with such insignificant men as Decker and Heywood!

Nevertheless (or possibly on that account) there is little doubt that Shakespeare found Chapman personally antipathetic. His style was unequalled for arrogance and pedantry; he was insufferably vain of his learning, and not a whit less conceited of the divine inspiration he, as poet, must necessarily possess. Even the most ardent of his modern admirers admits that his own poems are both grotesque and wearisome, and Shakespeare must certainly have suffered under the miserable conclusion Chapman added to Marlowe's beautiful Hero and Leander, a poem that Shakespeare himself so greatly admired. Take only the fragment of introductory prose which prefaces his translation of Homer, and try to wade through it. Short as it is, it is impossible. Read but the confused garrulity and impossible imagery of the dedication in 1598, and could a more shocking collection of mediæval philology be found outside the two pages he writes about Homer?

Swinburne, who loves him, says of his style: "Demosthenes, according to report, taught himself to speak with pebbles in his mouth; but it is presumable that he also learnt to dispense with their aid before he stood up against Eschines or Hyperides on any great occasion of public oratory. Our philosophic poet, on the other hand, before addressing such audience as he may find, is careful always to fill his mouth till the jaws are stretched well-nigh to bursting with the largest, roughest, and most angular of polygonal flintstones that can be hewn or dug out of the mine of language; and as fast as one voluminous sentence or unwieldy paragraph has emptied his mouth of the first batch of barbarisms, he is no less careful to refill it before proceeding to a fresh delivery."[2] The comparison is strikingly exact.

It is this incomprehensible style which made Chapman's readers so few in number, and caused his frequent complaints of being slighted and neglected. As Swinburne jestingly says of him:

"We understand a fury in his words, But not his words."

Even in his fine translation of Homer, he is unable to forego his tendency to obscurity, and constrained and inflated expression. It is universally admitted that even a translation must take some colouring from its translator, and no man in England was less Hellenic than Chapman. Swinburne has rightly observed that his temperament was more Icelandic than Greek, that he handled the sacred vessels of Greek art with the substantial grasp of the barbarian, and when he would reproduce Homer he gave rather the stride of a giant than the step of a god.

In all probability it was the grief Shakespeare felt at seeing Chapman selected by Pembroke, added to the ill-humour caused by the elder poet's arrogance and clumsy pedantry, which goaded him into wanton opposition to the inevitable enthusiasm for the Homeric world and its heroes.

And so he gave his bitter mood full play.

He touches upon the Iliad's most beautiful and most powerful elements, Achilles' wrath, the friendship between Achilles and Patroclus, the question of Helen being delivered to the Greeks, the attempt to goad Achilles into renewing the conflict, Hector and Andromache's farewell, and Hector's death, but only to profane and ridicule all.

It was a curious coincidence that Shakespeare should lay hands on this material just at the most despondent period of his life; for nowhere could we well receive a deeper impression of modern crudeness and decadence, and never could we meet with a fuller expression of German-Gothic innate barbarism in relation to Hellenism than when we see this great poet of the Northern Renaissance make free with the poetry of the old world.

Let us recall, for instance, the friendship, the brotherhood, existing between Achilles and Patroclus as it is drawn by Homer, and then see what an abomination Shakespeare, under the influence of his own times, makes of it.[3] He causes Thersites to spit upon the connection, and by not allowing any one to protest, so full of loathing for humanity has he become, leaves us to suppose his version to be correct.

How refined and Greek is Homer's treatment of Helen's position. There is no hint there of the modern ridicule of Menelaus; he is equally worthy, equally "beloved by the gods," and still the same mighty hero, if his wife has been abducted. Nor is there any scorn for Helen, only worship for her marvellous beauty, which even the old men upon the walls turn their heads to watch, only compassion for her fate and sympathy with her sufferings. And now, here, this eternal mockery of Menelaus as a deserted husband, these endless good and bad jests on his lot, this barbaric laughter over Helen as unchaste!

Thersites is made the mouthpiece of most of it. Shakespeare found his name in Ovid, and a description of his person in Homer, in one of the books first translated by Chapman:—

"——All sate, and audience gave, Thersites only would speak all. A most disordered store Of words he foolishly poured out, of which his mind held more Than it could manage; anything with which he could procure Laughter, he never could contain. He should have yet been sure To touch no kings; t' oppose their states becomes not jesters' parts, But he the filthiest fellow was of all that had deserts In Troy's brave siege. He was squint-eyed, and lame of either foot; So crook-backed that he had no breast; sharp-headed where did shoot (Here and there spersed) thin mossy hair. He most of all envied Ulysses and Æacides, whom yet his spleen would chide."

The argument which has been brought forward to prove that Shakespeare could not have known this description creating the character of Thersites is worthless. It has been considered impossible that he, who knew so well how to turn all material to account, should not have profited, in that case, by the famous scene where Odysseus beats Thersites. As a matter of fact, Shakespeare did so, and with much humour, only it is Ajax who is the chastiser, while Thersites exclaims (Act ii. sc. 3): "He beats me, and I rail at him. O worthy satisfaction! would it were otherwise; that I could beat him, while he railed at me."

Clearly enough, the character of the witty, malicious lampooner made an impression upon Shakespeare, and he, probably following the example of earlier plays, transformed him into a clown, and made him act as chorus accompanying the action of the play. Such, obviously, was the Fool in Lear; but how different is the melancholy, emotional satire to which King Lear's faithful companion in distress gives vent from the flaying, scorching scorn, the stream of fierce invective wherewith Thersites overwhelms every one and everything.

One cannot but see that these lampoons of Menelaus and Helen represent Shakespeare's own feeling, partly because Thersites is undoubtedly used as a kind of Satyr-chorus, and partly because the dispassionate and unprejudiced characters of the drama express themselves in harmony with him.

Notice, for instance, this reply of Thersites (Act ii. sc. 3):

"After this, the vengeance upon the whole camp! or, rather, the bone-ache! for that, methinks, is the curse upon those that war for a placket"

"Here is such patchery, such juggling, and such knavery! all the argument is a cuckold and a whore; a good quarrel to draw emulous factions and bleed to death upon. Now the dry serpigo on the subject! and war and lechery confound all!"

Or read this description of Menelaus (Act v. sc. I):

"And the goodly transformation of Jupiter there, his brother the bull, the primitive statue and oblique memorial of cuckolds; a thrifty shoeing-horn in a chain, hanging at his brother's leg—to what form but that he is, should wit larded with malice, and malice forced with wit, turn him to? To an ass, were nothing; he is both ass and ox; to an ox, were nothing; he is both ox and ass. To be a dog, a mule, a cat, a fitchew, a toad, a lizard, an owl, a puttock, or a herring without a roe, I would not care; but to be Menelaus! I would conspire against destiny. Ask me not what I would be if I were not Thersites; for I care not to be the louse of a lazar, so I were not Menelaus."

One can by no means accept this as merely the outburst of a brawling slave's hatred of his superiors, for the entirely unprejudiced Diomedes expresses himself in the same spirit to Paris (Act iv. sc. I):

"Paris. And tell me, noble Diomede, faith, tell me true, Even in the soul of sound good fellowship, Who, in your thoughts, merits fair Helen best, Myself or Menelaus. Diomedes. Both alike: He merits well to have her that doth seek her, Not making any scruple of her soilure, With such a hell of pain and world of charge; And you as well to keep her, that defend her, Not palating her dishonour, With such a costly load of wealth and friends: He, like a puling cuckold, would drink up The lees and dregs of a flat tamed piece; You, like a lecher, out of whorish loins Are pleased to breed out your inheritors: Both merits poised, each weighs nor less nor more; But he as he, the heavier for a whore. Paris. You are too bitter to your countrywoman. Diomedes. She's bitter to her country: hear me, Paris: For every false drop in her bawdy veins A Grecian's life hath sunk; for every scruple Of her contaminated carrion weight A Trojan hath been slain: since she could speak She hath not given so many good words breath As for her Greeks and Trojans have suffered death."

In the Iliad these forms represent the outcome of the imagination of the noblest people of the Mediterranean shores, unaffected by religious terrors and alcohol; they are bright, glad, reverential fantasies, born in a warm sun under a deep blue sky. From Shakespeare they step forth travestied by the gloom and bitterness of a great poet of a Northern race, of a stock civilised by Christianity, not by culture; a stock which, despite all the efforts of the Renaissance to give new birth to heathendom, has become, once for all, disciplined and habituated to look upon the senses as tempters which lead down into the mire; to which the pleasurable is the forbidden and sexual attraction a disgrace.

How significant it is that Shakespeare only sees Greek love as scourged by the lash of venereal diseases. Throughout the entire play a pestilential breath of innuendo is blown with outbursts of cursing, all centering on a contagion which first showed itself some thousand years after the Homeric times. As Homeric friendships are bestialised, so is Greek love profaned to suit modern circumstances. To Thersites, the Greek princes are, every one of them, scandalous rakes. "Here's Agamemnon, an honest fellow enough, and one that loves quails, but he has not as much brain as earwax" (Act v. sc. I). "That same Diomed's a false-hearted rogue, a most unjust knave.... They say he keeps a Trojan drab and uses the traitor Calchas' tent.—Nothing but lechery; all incontinent varlets" (Act v. sc. I). Achilles, that "idol of idiot worshippers," that "full dish of fool," has Queen Hecuba's daughter as a concubine, and has treacherously promised her to leave his fellow-countrymen in the lurch. "Patroclus will give me anything for the intelligence of this whore: the parrot will not do more for an almond than he for a commodious drab. Lechery, lechery still, nothing else holds fashion." Of Menelaus and Paris, "cuckold and cuckold-maker," enough has already been said. Helen has been sternly condemned, and of Cressida with her two adorers, Troilus and Diomedes, "How the devil luxury, with his fat rump and potato-fingers, tickles these two together! Fry lechery, fry" (Act v. sc. 2).

It is clear that the Christian conception of faithlessness in love has displaced the old Hellenic innocence and naïveté. How fervent is Achilles' love for Briseis in Homer; how honest, warm, and indignant he is when he asks Agamemnon's messengers if among the children of men only the Atrides love their wives, and he himself answers that every man who is brave and of good understanding loves and shelters his wife, as he of his inmost heart loved and would shelter Briseis, prisoner of war though she was. None the less does Homer tell us how immediately after Achilles has ended his speech and dismissed his guests, he stretches himself upon his couch, "in the inner room of his tent, richly wrought, and that fair lady by his side that he from Lesbos brought, bright Diomeda." It never occurs to the Greek poet that this implies any faithlessness to the absent Briseis, but Shakespeare's standard is thoroughly and mediævally rigorous.

On two points the comparison between Homer and Shakespeare is inevitable. The first is the farewell between Hector and Andromache. There is nothing finer in Greek poetry (which is to say, any poetry) than this tragic idyl, so profoundly human and movingly beautiful as it is. The pure womanliness which out of deep grief and pain utters a complaint without weakness, and expresses without sentimentality a boundless love poured out upon this one object: "Thy life makes still my father be, my mother, brother, and besides thou art my husband too. Most loved, most worthy."

In contrast to this womanliness stands the man's strength, untouched by harshness, stirred by the deepest tenderness, but fixed in immovable determination. The picture of the child, too, frightened by the nodding plumes upon his father's helm, until Hector sets the casque upon the ground and kisses the tears from the eyes of his boy. The scene takes place in the sixth book of the Iliad; and could not have been known to Shakespeare, inasmuch much as it was as yet untranslated by Chapman. See what he sets in its place:

"Andromache. Unarm, unarm, and do not fight to-day.

Hector. You train me to offend you: get you in: By all the everlasting gods I'll go!

Andromache. My dreams will, sure, prove ominous to the day.

Hector. No more, I say."

This is the harshness of a mediæval duke; the golden dust is brushed from the wings of the Greek Psychè. If Harald Hardrada, as chieftain of the Varangians, ever gave a thought to the spirit of Greek art, as he passed with his troops through the streets of Constantinople, he must have looked upon it thus, despising the ancient Hellenes because he found the modern cowardly and effeminate.

Shakespeare had no particular place and no particular people in his mind when he wrote this play; he simply robbed the finest scenes of their beauty, because his mind, at that time, had elected to dwell upon the lowest and basest side of human nature.

The second point is the mission to Achilles, told in the ninth book of the Iliad. It was translated and published by Chapman in 1598, and must certainly have been known to Shakespeare.[4] This book is one of the few finished works of art which have been produced upon this earth. The Greek Epos itself contains nothing more consummate than its delineation of character, the contrast between the arrogant and the intellectual, the polished and the humorous, the interplay of personality from the highest pathos to the reiterated twaddle of the old man. Achilles' wrath, Nestor's experience, Odysseus' subtle tact, Phœnix's good-natured rambling, the wounded pride of the Hellenic emissaries, are all gathered together in the endeavour to induce Achilles to quit his tent.

Contrast this with the burlesque attempt to provoke that cowardly snob and raw dunce, of an Achilles out of his exclusiveness, by passing him by without returning his greeting or seeming conscious of his existence; this same Achilles, who falls upon Hector with his myrmidons and scoundrelly murders him, just as the hero, wearied by battle, has taken off his helmet and laid aside his sword. It reads like the invention of a mediæval barbarian. But Shakespeare is neither mediæval nor a barbarian. No, he has written it down out of a bitterness so deep that he has felt hero-worship, like love, to be an illusion of the senses. As the phantasy of first love is absurd, and Troilus's loyalty towards its object ridiculous, so is the honour of our forefathers and of war in general a delusion. Shakespeare now suspects the most assured reputations; he believes that if Achilles really lived at all, he was most probably a stupid and vainglorious boaster, just as Helen must have been a hussy by no means worthy of the turmoil which was made about her.

As he distorted Achilles into an absurdity, so he wrenched all other personalities into caricatures. Gervinus has justly remarked that Shakespeare here acts very much as his Patroclus does when he mimics Agamemnon's loftiness and Nestor's weakness, for Achilles' delectation (Act i. sc. 3). We feel in the delineation of Nestor that Anglo-Saxon master-hand which seizes upon the unsightly details which the Greek ignores:

"He coughs and spits, And with a palsy fumbling on his gorget, Shakes in and out the rivet."

And we recognise in the allusion to the mimicry of Agamemnon that cheap estimate of an actor's profession, which, with a contempt for the whole guild of poets, is discernible throughout Shakespeare's works, in spite of his efforts to raise both callings in the eyes of the public.[5]

Nestor is overwhelmed with ridicule, and is made to declare, at the close of the first act, that he will hide his silver beard in a golden beaver, and will maintain in duel with Hector that his own long-dead wife was as great a beauty and as chaste a wife as Hector's—grandmother.

Ulysses, who is intended to represent the wise man of the play, is as trivial of mind as the rest. There was a certain amount of grandeur in the way Iago handled Othello, Rodrigo, and Cassio, as though they were mere puppets in his hands; but there is none in the sport Ulysses makes of those swaggering numskulls, Achilles and Ajax. The bitterness which breathes out of all that Shakespeare writes at this period has found gratification in making Ulysses not one whit more sublime than the fools with whom he plays.

Amongst German critics, Gervinus has characterised Troilus and Cressida as a good-naturedly humorous play. No description could be more unlikely. Seldom has a poet been less good-natured than Shakespeare here. No less impossible is the theory (also nourished in Gervinus' imagination) that the poet of the English Renaissance was offended by the loose ethics of Homeric poetry. Shakespeare most certainly was never so moral as this moralising German critic (and what German critic is not moralising) would have him to be. It is not a sense of the ethics of Homer, but a feeling for his poetry that is lacking. In Shakespeare's time men took too much pleasure in classical culture to appreciate the antique naïveté. It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when popular poetry once more began to be universally honoured, that Homer displaced Virgil in the popular estimation. Even Goethe preferred Virgil to Homer. Gervinus is equally wide of the mark when, in his anxiety to prove Troilus and Cressida a purely literary satire, he hazards the assertion that Shakespeare never intended here to "hold up a mirror to his times;"[6] for it is precisely his own times, and no other, that were in his mind when he wrote this play.

X

SCORN OF WOMAN'S GUILE AND PUBLIC STUPIDITY

Troilus and Cressida first appeared in 1609 in two editions, one of which is introduced by a remarkable and diverting preface, entitled "A never writer to an ever reader, News." It says:—

"Eternall reader, you have heere a new play, never stal'd with the stage, never clapper-clawd with the palmes of the Vulgar, and yet passing full of the palme comicall; for it is a birth of your brain, that never undertooke anything comicall, vainely: And were but the vaine names of commedies changde for the titles of Commodities, or of Playes for Pleas; you should see all those grand censors, that now stile them such vanities, flocke to them for the maine grace of their gravities: especially this author's Commedies, that are so framed to the life, that they serve for the most common Commentaries, of all the actions of our lives, shewing such a dexteritie, and power of witte, that the most displeased with playes are pleased with his comedies. And all such dull and heavy-witted worldlings, as were never capable of the witte of a commedie, coming by report of them to his representations, have found that witte there, that they never found in themselves, and have parted better witted than they came: feeling an edge of witte set upon them, more than ever they dreamed they had brain to grind it on. So much and such sauvred salt of witte is in his Commedies, that they seem (for their height of pleasure) to be borne in that sea that brought forth Venus. Amongst all there is none more witty than this. And had I time I would comment upon it, though I know it needs it not (for so much as will make you think your testerne well bestowed), but for so much worth, as ever poore I know to be stuft in it. It deserves such a labour, as well as the best Commedy in Terence or Plautus. And believe this, that when he is gone, and his Commedies out of sale, you will scramble for them and set up a new English inquisition. Take this for a warning, and at the perrill of your pleasures losse, and judgements, refuse not nor like this the less for not being sullied with the smoaky breath of the multitude; but thanke fortune for the scape it hath made amongst you. Since by the grand possessors wills I believe you should have prayed for them rather than been prayed. And so I leave all such to be prayed for (for the state of their witte's health) that will not praise it. VALE."

How remarkable a comprehension of Shakespeare's work this old-time preface shows, how clear-sighted an enthusiasm, and how just a perception of his position in the future.

The play was again published in 1623 in folio, and under conditions which betray the publisher's perplexity as to its classification. It is altogether missing from the list of contents, in which the plays are arranged under three headings, comedies, histories, and tragedies. It is thrust, unpaged, into the middle of the book, between the histories and the tragedies, between Henry VIII. and Coriolanus, probably because the editor mistakenly deemed it to contain more of history and of tragedy than of comedy. Of all Shakespeare's works, it is Troilus and Cressida which most nearly approaches the Don Quixote of Cervantes.

It is a proof of the stultifying effect of the too close attention of philological critics to metrical peculiarities (peculiarities which a poet can always accommodate as he thinks proper) upon the finer psychological sense, that either the whole or a greater part of Troilus and Cressida has been taken for the work of Shakespeare's youth, and has been attributed to the Romeo and Juliet period. This view has been taken by L. Moland and C. d'Hericault in their Nouvelles Françaises du 14^me Siècle, and not a few undiscerning biographers of Shakespeare.

The contrast between the two plays is remarkable and instructive. Romeo and Juliet is a genuine work of youth, a product of truth and faith. Troilus and Cressida is the outcome of the disillusionment, suspicion, and bitterness of ripe manhood. The critics have been deceived by the apparently astonishing youthfulness of parts of Troilus and Cressida, some upon the ground of its occasional euphuisms and bombast (evidently satirical), others by the enthusiasm of youth and absorption in love which some of Troilus's replies express; for instance:

"I tell thee I am mad In Cressid's love: thou answer'st 'She is fair,' Pour'st in the open ulcer of my heart Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice," &c.

In his most ardent raptures there sounds a note of ridicule.[1].

All this is a complete inversion of Romeo and Juliet. His youthful tragedy portrayed a woman so staunchly true in love that she is driven thereby to a bitter death. Troilus and Cressida deals with a woman whose constancy fails at the first proof. There is no abyss between the soul and the senses in Romeo and Juliet; the two melt into one in fullest harmony. But it is the lower side of love's ideal nature which is parodied in Troilus and Cressida, and causes it to resemble the flippant accompaniment to the serenade in Mozart's Don Juan, which caricatures the sentimentality of the text.

It is true that there is a chivalrous fine feeling and sensual tenderness in Troilus's love, which seems to foreshadow, as it were, that which some centuries later found such full expression in Keats. But the melancholy of Shakespeare's matured perception sets its iron tooth in everything at this period of his life, and he looks upon absorption in love as senseless and laughable. He shows us how blindly Troilus runs into the snare, giddy with happiness and uplifted to the heavens, and how the next moment he awakes from his intoxication, betrayed; but he shows it without sympathy, coldly. Therefore, the play never once arouses any true emotion, since Troilus himself never really interests. The piece blazes out, but imparts no warmth. Shakespeare wrote it thus, and therefore, while Troilus and Cressida will find many readers who will admire it, few will love it.

Shakespeare deliberately made Cressida sensually attractive, but spiritually repulsive and unclean. She has desire for Troilus, but no love. She is among those who are born experienced; she knows how to inflame, win, and keep men enchained, but the honourable love of a man is useless to her. At the same time she is one of those who easily find their master. Any man who is not imposed upon by her airs, who sees through her mock-prudish rebuffs, subdues her without difficulty. All her sagacity amounted to, after all, was that Troilus would continue ardent so long as she said "No;" that men, in short, value the unattainable and what is won with difficulty,—the wisdom of any commonplace coquette. Never has Shakespeare represented coquetry as so void of charming qualities.

Cressida is never modest even when she is most prudish; she understands a jest, even bold and libertine ones, and she will bandy them with enjoyment. With all her kittenish charm she is uninteresting, and, in spite of her hot blood, she betrays the coldest selfishness. She is neither ridiculous nor unlovely, but as little is she beautiful; in no other of Shakespeare's characters is the sensual attraction exercised by a woman so completely shorn of its poetry.

Her uncle Pandarus is as experienced as she is in the art of exciting by alternately thrusting forward and holding back. He has been named a demoralised Polonius, and the epithet is good. He is an old voluptuary, who finds his amusement in playing the spy and go-between, now that more active pleasures are denied to him. The cynical enjoyment with which Shakespeare (in spite of his contempt for him) has drawn him is very characteristic of this period of his life. Pandarus is clever enough, and often witty, but there is no enjoyment of his wit; he is as comical, base, and shameless as Falstaff himself, but he never calls forth the abstract sympathy we feel for the latter. Nothing makes amends for his vileness, nor for that of Thersites, nor for that of any other character in the whole play. Here, as in other plays, Timon of Athens in particular, is shown that deep-seated Anglo-Saxon vein which, according to the popular estimate, Shakespeare entirely lacked,—that vein in which flows the life-blood of Swift's, Hogarth's, and even some of Byron's principal works, and it shows how, after all, there was some sympathy between the Merrie England of those days and the later Land of Spleen.

We have noticed the harsh strength of Ulysses' judgment of Cressida, and in the decisive scene, in which Troilus is the unseen witness of Cressida's perfidy, are written words so weighty and so full of emotion that we feel Shakespeare's very soul speaks in them.

Diomedes begs Cressida for the scarf which Troilus has given her.

"Diomedes. I had your heart before, this follows it.

Troilus (aside). I did swear patience.

Cressida. You shall not have it, Diomed, faith you shall not: I'll give you something else.

Diomedes. I will have this: whose was it?

Cressida. It is no matter.

Diomedes. Come, tell me whose it was?

Cressida. 'Twas one that loved me better than you will' But, now you have it, take it."

And the bit of feminine psychology which Shakespeare has given in Cressida's farewell to Diomedes:

"Good-night: I prithee, come. Troilus, farewell! one eye yet looks on thee, But with my heart the other eye doth see. Ah, poor our sex! This fault in us I find, The error of our eye directs our mind."

And the terrible words Shakespeare puts into Troilus's mouth when he tries so desperately to shake off the impression, and deny the possibility of what he has seen:

"Ulysses. Why stay we, then?' Troilus. To make a recordation to my soul Of every syllable that here was spoken. But if I tell how these two did co-act, Shall I not lie in publishing this truth? Sith yet there is a credence in my heart An esperance so obstinately strong, That doth invert the attest of eyes and ears, As if those organs had deceptious functions Created only to calumniate. Was Cressid here? Ulysses. I cannot conjure, Trojan. Troilus. She was not, sure. Ulysses. Most sure she was. Troilus. Why, my negation hath no taste of madness. Ulysses. Nor mine, my lord. Cressid was here but now. Troilus. Let it not be believed for womanhood! Think, we had mothers: do not give advantage To stubborn critics, apt, without a theme, For depravation, to square this general sex By Cressid's rule; rather think this not Cressid. Ulysses. What hath she done, prince, that can soil our mothers? Troilus. Nothing at all, unless that that were she."

Not only Troilus, but the whole play has here become permeated by Ulysses' conception of Cressida, and in this despairing outburst, "Think, we had mothers," is the pith of the piece uttered forth with terrible clearness.

Yet Troilus and Cressida by no means represent the whole of the play. In order to counterbalance the slightness of the action, the bombastic speech, the railing abuse, and the heavy bitter Juvenal-like satire of his drama, Shakespeare has interpolated some serious and thoughtful utterances in which some of the fruits of his abundant experience are expressed in weighty and concise form.

Achilles, and more especially Ulysses, give vent to profound political and psychological reflections, entirely regardless of the fact that the one is a thoughtless blockhead, and the other is a crafty and unsympathetic nature, the mere negative pole of Troilus, cold as he is warm, cunning as he is naïve. These remarkable and thoughtful utterances, not in the least in harmony with their characters, stand in direct contradiction to the whole play and its farcical treatment, but they are none the less notable for that. This singular inconsistency is one of the many in which this incongruous play is so rich, and it is these very contradictions which make it attractive, insomuch as they reveal the conflicting moods from which it sprang. They arrest the attention like the irregular features of a face whose expression varies between irony, satire, melancholy, and profundity.

Ulysses, who is represented as the sole statesman among the Greeks, degrades himself by low flattery of the idiotic Ajax, servilely referring to him as "this thrice worthy and right valiant lord," who should not soil the victory he has won by going as messenger to Achilles' tent, and he persuades the princes to pass Achilles by without greeting him. On this occasion Achilles, who is otherwise but a braggart, dolt, coward, and scoundrel, surprises us by a succession of outbursts, in each of which he gives voice to as deep and bitter knowledge of human nature as does Timon of Athens himself.

"What, am I poor of late? 'Tis certain greatness once fall'n out with Fortune Must fall out with men too: what the declined is He shall as soon read in the eyes of others, As feel in his own fall. . . . . . . . And not a man, for being simply man, Hath any honour, but honour for those honours That are without him, as place, riches, favour, Prizes of accident as oft as merit: Which when they fall, as being slippery standers, The love that leaned on them is slippery too, Do one pluck down another, and together Die in the fall."

Ulysses now enters upon a thoughtful conversation with Achilles, calling his attention to the fact that no man, however highly advanced he may be, has any real knowledge of his worth until he has received the judgment of others and observed their attitude towards him. Achilles answers him a happy and pertinent analogy on principles of pure philosophical reasonings, and Ulysses continues:

"That no man is the lord of anything Till he communicate his parts to others; Nor doth he of himself know them for aught Till he behold them formed in the applause Where they're extended: who like an arch reverberates The voice again, or, like a gate of steel Fronting the sun, receives and renders back His figure and his heart."

Achilles interrupts a long discourse, ending with a thrust at Ajax, with the question "What, are my deeds forgot?" and the remarkable answer he receives reveals, to an observant reader, one of the sources of the bitterness and pessimism of the play. It can scarcely be doubted that Shakespeare at this time felt himself ousted from the popular favour by younger and less worthy men: we know that immediately after his death he was eclipsed by Fletcher. He is absorbed by a feeling of the ingratitude of man and the injustice of what is called the way of the world. We found the first traces of this feeling in the words of Bertram's dead father, quoted by the King in All's Well that Ends Well, and here it breaks out in full force in a reply whose very weak pretext is that of showing Achilles how ill advised he is to rest upon his laurels:

"Time hath, my lord, a wallet on his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, A great-sized monster of ingratitudes: Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devoured As fast as they are made, forgot as soon As done: perseverance dear, my lord, Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail In monumental mockery. Take the instant way; For honour travels in a strait so narrow, Where but one goes abreast: keep then the path; For emulation hath a thousand sons That one by one pursue: if you give way, Or hedge aside from the direct forthright, Like to an entered tide, they all rush by And leave you hindmost; Or like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank, Lie there for pavement to the abject rear, O'errun and trampled on: then what they do in present, Though less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours; For time is like a fashionable host, That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand, And with his arms outstretched, as he would fly, Grasps in the comer; welcome ever smiles, And farewell goes out sighing. Oh, let not virtue seek Remuneration for the thing it was; For beauty, wit, High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service, Love, friendship, charity are subjects all To envious and calumniating time. One touch of nature makes the whole world kin, That all with one consent praise new-born gauds, Though they are made and moulded of things past; And give to dust that is a little gilt More land than gilt o'erdusted."

How plainly is one of the sources betrayed here of the black waters of bitterness which bubble up in Troilus and Cressida, a bitterness which spares neither man nor woman, war nor love, hero nor lover, and which springs in part from woman's guile, in part from the undoubted stupidity of the English public. In the latter part of the conversation between Ulysses and Achilles the former has some renowned words on the direction of the state—its ideal government, that is to say. The incongruity between the circumstance of utterance and the utterance itself is nowhere more striking in this play than here. Ulysses tells Achilles that they all know why he refuses to take part in the battle; every one is well aware that he is in love with Priam's daughter; and when Achilles exclaims in amazement at finding the secrets of his private life disclosed, Ulysses, with a solemnity inconsistent with the triviality of the subject and the grim ways of espionage, gives the almost mystical and too profound answer:

"Is that a wonder? The providence that's in a watchful state Knows almost every grain of Pluto's gold, Finds bottom in the uncomprehensive deeps, Keeps place with thought, and almost, like the gods, Does thoughts unveil in their dumb cradles. There is a mystery—with whom relation Durst never meddle—in the soul of state; Which hath an operation more divine Than breath or pen can give expression to."

He then turns abruptly to the subject of Achilles's amours with Polyxena being common talk, and seeks to provoke the lover into joining the combat by telling him that it has become a common jest that Achilles has conquered Hector's sister, but that Ajax has subdued Hector himself, and then ends his speech with the following obscure allusion to the relation between Achilles and Ajax:—

"Farewell, my lord. I as your lover speak: The fool slides o'er the ice that you should break."[2]

In spite of the strange inconsistency of all these political allusions, they are of the greatest interest to us, inasmuch as they so clearly indicate Shakespeare's next great work, the Roman tragedy of Coriolanus (1608).

Ulysses makes steady protest against the vulgar error that it is the gross work, and not the guiding spirit, which is decisive in war and politics. He complains of the abuse Achilles and Thersites heap upon the leaders of the campaign (Act i. sc. 3):

"They tax our policy and call it cowardice, Count wisdom as no member of the war, Forestall prescience, and esteem no act But that of hand: the still and mental parts That do contrive how many hands shall strike When fitness calls them on, and know by measure Of their observant toil the enemies' weight— Why, 'this hath not a finger's dignity," &c.

It is, of course, Thersites who has taken the lead; the light wit and deep humour of the earlier clowns is displaced in him by the frantic outbursts of a contemptible scamp. Throughout, Thersites is intended as a caricature of the envious and worthless (if sharpsighted) plebeian, of whose wit Shakespeare has need for the complete scourging of an arrogant and corrupt aristocracy, but whose politics are the subject of his utter disgust and scorn. As the haughty intelligence of Ulysses seems to foreshadow Prospero, but without his bright supernatural clearness, so does Thersites seem to be a preliminary sketch for Caliban, barring his heavy, earthy, grotesque clumsiness. The character more immediately allied to that of Thersites, however, is not Caliban, but that grim cynic Apemantus in Timon of Athens.

Still more significant than the previously quoted lines is the speech in which Ulysses (Act i. sc. 3) develops a political view which was obviously Shakespeare's own, and which is soon to be proclaimed in Coriolanus. Its point of view proceeds from the conviction, expressed in our day by Nietzsche, that the distance between man and man must on no account be bridged over, and is introduced by a half-astronomical, half-astrological explanation of the Ptolemaic system:

"The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office and custom, in all line of order; And therefore is the glorious planet Sol In noble eminence enthroned and sphered Amidst the others; whose med'cinable eye Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil, And posts, like the commandment of a king, Sans check to good and bad: but when the planets In evil mixture to disorder wander, What plagues and what portents! what mutiny! What raging of the sea! frights, changes, horrors, Divert and crack, rend and deracinate The unity and married calm of states Quite from their fixture."

The remainder of the passage has become a fixed ingredient of English Shakespearian anthologies, and carries us on directly into Coriolanus:

"Oh, when degree is shaked, Which is the ladder to all high designs, Then enterprise is sick.... Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark, what discord follows! each thing meets In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores, And make a sop of all this solid globe: Strength should be lord of imbecility, And the rude son should strike the father dead. Force should be right; or rather right and wrong, Between whose endless jar justice resides, Should lose their names, and so should justice too. . . . . . . . . This chaos, when degree is suffocate, Follows the choking. And this neglection of degree it is That by a pace goes backward, with a purpose It hath to climb. The general's disdained By him one step below, he by the next, That next by him beneath... ... It grows to an envious fever Of pale and bloodless emulation."

Shakespeare has so often emphasised the superiority of real merit to outside show, that he needs no vindication from a charge of worship of mere rank and station. What he here expresses is merely that inherently aristocratic point of view which we recognized in his early works, and which has intensified with increasing years. It was from the first founded upon a conviction that only among an hereditary aristocracy, under a well-established monarchy, was any patronage of his art and profession possible, and the opinion, steadily nourished by the enmity of the middle classes, will soon be expressed with extraordinary vehemence in Coriolanus.

Troilus and Cressida, then, which seems at first sight to be a romantic play founded on an old world subject, is in reality, despite its embellishments, a satire on the ancient material, and a parody of romanticism itself. It cannot therefore be classed with the attempts made by other great poets to resuscitate the old Greek personalities. Racine's Iphigenia in Aulis and Goethe's Iphigenia in Tauris, were written in serious earnestness, although neither of them approximated closely to the old world of tradition. Racine's Greeks are courtly Frenchmen from the salons, and Goethe's are German princes and princesses, of humane and classic culture, who attitudinise like the figures in a painting by Raphael Mengs. It may be said that Shakespeare's Hector, who quotes Aristotle, and his Lord Achilles, with his spurs and long sword, are as much noblemen of the Renaissance as Racine's Seigneur Achilles is a courtier in periwig and red-heeled shoes. But Racine meant no satire, while Shakespeare most deliberately caricatured. All turns to discord under his touch; love is betrayed, heroes are murdered, constancy ridiculed, levity and coarseness triumph, and no gleam of better things shines out at the end. The play closes with an indecent jest of the loathsome Pandar's.

XI

DEATH OF SHAKESPEARE'S MOTHER—CORIOLANUS—HATRED OF THE MASSES

Shakespeare's mother was buried on the 9th of September 1608. He had travelled about the country of late, playing with his company, from the middle of May until far into the autumn, during which period court and aristocracy were absent from the capital. It is not certain whether he had returned to London at this time or not, but he hastened to Stratford on hearing of his mother's death, and must have stayed some time on his property, "New Place," after attending her funeral; for we find him still at Stratford on the 16th of October. On that day he stands godfather to the son of a friend of his youth, Henry Walker, an alderman of the borough, who is mentioned in Shakespeare's will.

The death of a mother is always a mournfully irreparable loss, often the saddest a man can sustain. We can realise how deeply it would go to Shakespeare's heart when we remember the capacity for profound and passionate feeling with which nature had blessed and cursed him. We know little of his mother; but judging from that affinity which generally exists between famous sons and their mothers, we may suppose that she was no ordinary woman. Mary Arden, who belonged to an old and honourable family, which traced its descent (perhaps justly) back to the days of Edward the Confessor, represented the haughty patrician element of the Shakespeare family. Her ancestors had borne their coat of arms for centuries, and the son would be proud of his mother for this among other reasons, just as the mother would be proud of her son.

In the midst of the prevailing gloom and bitterness of his spirit, this fresh blow fell upon him, and, out of his weariness of life as his surroundings and experiences showed it to him, recalled this one mainstay to him—his mother. He remembered all she had been to him for forty-four years, and the thoughts of the man and the dreams of the poet were thus led to dwell upon the significance in a man's life of this unique form, comparable to no other—his mother.

Thus it was that, although his genius must follow the path it had entered upon and pursue it to the end, we find, in the midst of all that was low and base in his next work, this one sublime mother-form, the proudest and most highly-wrought that he has drawn, Volumnia.

The Tragedy of Coriolanus was first published in 1623, in folio edition, but 1608 is the generally accepted date of its production, partly because a speech in Ben Jonson's The Silent Woman (1609) seems to indicate a reminiscence of Coriolanus, and partly because many different critics concur in the opinion that its style and versification point to that year.

How came this work to emerge from the depths of all the discontent, despondency, hatred of life, and contempt for humanity which went at this time to make up Shakespeare's soul? He was angry and soured, and the sources of his embittered feelings are embodied in his plays, seeking outlet, now under one, now under another form. In Troilus and Cressida it was the relation of the sexes; here it is social conditions and politics.

His point of view is as personal as it well could be. Shakespeare's aversion to the mob was based upon his contempt for their discrimination, but it had its deepest roots in the purely physical repugnance of his artist nerves to their plebeian atmosphere. It was obvious in Troilus and Cressida that the irritation with public stupidity was at its height. He now, for the third time, finds in his Plutarch a subject which not only responds to the mood of the moment, but also gives him an opportunity for portraying a notable mother; and he is irresistibly drawn to give his material dramatic style.

It is the old traditional story of Coriolanus, great man and great general, who, in the remote days of Roman antiquity, became involved in such hopeless conflict with the populace of his native city, and was so roughly dealt with by them in return, that he was driven, in his bitterness, to reckless deeds.

Plutarch, however, was by no means prejudiced against the people, and the subject had to be entirely re-fashioned by Shakespeare before it would harmonise with his mood. The historian may be guilty of serious contradictions in matters of detail, but he endeavours, to the best of his ability, to enter into the circumstances of times which were of hoary antiquity, even to him. The main drift of his narrative is to the effect that Coriolanus had already attained to great authority and influence in the city, when the Senate, which represented the wealth of the community, came into collision with the masses. The people were overridden by usurers, the law was terribly severe upon debtors, and the poor were subjected to incessant distraint; their few possessions were sold, and men who had fought bravely for their country and were covered with honourable scars were frequently imprisoned. In the recent war with the Sabines the patricians had been forced to promise the people better treatment in the future, but the moment the war was over they broke their word, and distraint and imprisonment went on as before. After this the plebeians refused to come forward at the conscription, and the patricians, in spite of the opposition of Coriolanus, were compelled to yield.

Shakespeare was evidently incapable of forming any idea of the free citizenship of olden days, still less of that period of ferment during which the Roman people united to form a vigorous political party, a civic and military power combined, which proved the nucleus round which the great Roman Empire eventually shaped itself—a power of which J. L. Heiberg's words on thought might have been predicted: "It will conquer the world, nothing less."

Much the same thing was occurring in Shakespeare's own time, and, under his very eyes, as it were, the English people were initiating their struggle for self-government. But they who constituted the Opposition were antagonistic to him and his art, and he looked without sympathy upon their conflict. Thus it was that those proud and self-reliant plebeians, who exiled themselves to Mons Sacer sooner than submit to the yoke of the patricians, represented no more to him than did that London mob which was daily before his eyes. To him the Tribunes of the People were but political agitators of the lowest type, mere personifications of the envy of the masses, and representatives of their stupidity and their brute force of numbers. Ignoring every incident which shed a favourable light upon the plebeians, he seized upon every instance of popular folly which could be found in Plutarch's account of a later revolt, in order to incorporate it in his scornful delineation. Again and again he insists, by means of his hero's passionate invective, on the cowardice of the people, and that in the face of Plutarch's explicit testimony to their bravery. His detestation of the mass thrived upon this reiterated accentuation of the wretched pusillanimity of the plebeians, which went hand-in-hand with a rebellious hatred for their benefactors.