III.

"Amongst them (barbarous nations) was also found the belief of purgatory, but after a new form, for what we ascribe unto fire they impute unto cold, and imagine that souls are both purged and punished by the vigor of an extreme coldness."94

And over and above this peculiar correspondence between the Essays and the two speeches on death, we may note how some of the lines of the Duke in the opening scene connect with two of the passages above cited in connection with Hamlet's last soliloquy, expressing the idea that nature or deity confers gifts in order that they should be used. The Duke's lines are among Shakspere's best:

"Thyself and thy belongingsAre not thine own so proper as to wasteThyself upon thy virtues, them on thee.Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,Not light them for themselves: for if our virtuesDid not go forth of us, 'twere all alikeAs if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touchedBut to fine issues: nor nature never lendsThe smallest scruple of her excellence,But, like a thrifty goddess, she determinesHerself the glory of a creditor,Both thanks and use...."

Here we have once more a characteristicallyShaksperean transmutation and development of the idea rather than a reproduction; and the same appears when we compare the admirable lines of the poet with a homiletic sentence from theApology of Raimond Sebonde:—

"It is not enough for us to serve God in spirit and soul; we owe him besides and we yield unto him a corporal worshipping: we apply our limbs, our motions, and all external things to honour him."

But granting the philosophic as well as the poetic heightening, we are still led to infer a stimulation of the poet's thought by the Essays—a stimulation not limited to one play, but affecting other plays written about the same time. Another point of connection betweenHamletandMeasure for Measureis seen when we compare the above passage, "Spirits are not finely touched but to fine issues," with Laertes' lines95:

"Nature is fine in love, and when 'tis fineIt sends some precious instance of itselfAfter the thing it loves."

And though such data are of course not conclusive as to the time of composition of the plays, there is so much of identity between thethought in the Duke's speech, just quoted, and a notable passage inTroilus and Cressida, as to strengthen greatly the surmise that the latter play was also written, or rather worked-over, by Shakspere about 1604. The phrase:

"if our virtuesDid not go forth of us, 'twere all the sameAs if we had them not,"

is developed in the speech of Ulysses to Achilles96:

"A strange fellow hereWrites me that man—how dearly ever partedHow much in having, or without, or in—Cannot make boast to have that which he hath,Nor feels not what he knows, but by reflection;As when his virtues shining upon othersHeat them, and they retort their heat againTo the first giver."

I do not remember in Montaigne any such development of the idea as Shakspere here gives it; indeed, we have seen him putting forth a contrary teaching; and looking to the context, where Ulysses admits the thesis to be "familiar," we are bound to infer a direct source for it. In all probability it derives from Seneca, who in his treatiseDe Beneficiis97throws out the germof the ideas as to Nature demanding back her gifts, and as to virtue being nothing if not reflected; and even suggests the principle of "thanks and use."98This treatise, too, lay to Shakspere's hand in the translation of 1578, where the passages: "Rerum natura nihil dicitur perdere, quia quidquid illi avellitur, ad illam redit; nec perire quidquam potest, quod quo excidat non habet, sed eodem evolvitur unde discedit"; and "quaedam quum sint honesta, pulcherrima summae virtutis, nisi cum altero non habent locum," are translated:

"The nature of a thing cannot be said to have foregone aught, because that whatsoever is plucked from it returneth to it again; neither can anything be lost which hath not whereout of to pass, but windeth back again unto whence it came;"

and

"Some things though they be honest, very goodly and right excellently vertuous, yet have they not their effect but in a co-partner."

Whether it was Shakspere's reading of Montaigne that sent him to Seneca, to whom Montaigne99avows so much indebtedness, we of course cannot tell; but it is enough for the purpose of our argument to say that we havehere another point or stage in a line of analytical thought on which Shakspere was embarked about 1603, and of which the starting point or initial stimulus was the perusal of Florio's Montaigne. We have the point of contact with Montaigne inHamlet, where the saying that reason is implanted in us to be used, is seen to be one of the many correspondences of thought between the play and the Essays. The idea is more subtly and deeply developed inMeasure for Measure, and still more subtly and philosophically inTroilus and Cressida. The fact of the process of development is all that is here affirmed, over and above the actual phenomena of reproduction before set forth.

As to these, the proposition is that in sum they constitute such an amount of reproduction of Montaigne as explains Jonson's phrase about habitual "stealings." There is no justification for applying that to the passage in theTempest, since not only is that play not known to have existed in its present form in 1605,100whenVolponewas produced, but the phrase plainly alleges not one but many borrowings. I am not aware that extracts from Montaigne have been traced in any others of the English contemporary dramatists. But here in two plays of Shakspere, then fresh in memory—the Second Quarto having been published in 1604 andMeasure for Measureproduced in the same year—were echoes enough from Montaigne to be noted by Jonson, whom we know to have owned, as did Shakspere, the Florio folio, and to have been Florio's warm admirer. And there seems to be a confirmation of our thesis in the fact that, while we find detached passages savouring of Montaigne in some later plays of the same period, as in one of the concluding period, theTempest, we do not again find in any one play such a cluster of reminiscences as we have seen inHamletandMeasure for Measure, though the spirit of Montaigne's thought, turned to a deepening pessimism, may be said to tinge all the later tragedies.

(a) InOthello(? 1604) we have Iago's "'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus," already considered, to say nothing of Othello's phrase—

"I saw it not, thought it not, it harmed not me....He that is robb'd, not wanting what is stolen,Let him not know it, and he's not robb'd at all."

—a philosophical commonplace which compares with various passages in the Fortieth Essay.

(b) InLear(1606) we have such a touch as the king's lines101—

"And take upon's the mystery of thingsAs if we were God's spies;"

—which recalls the vigorous protest of the essays,that a man ought soberly to meddle with the judging of the divine laws,102where Montaigne avows that if he dared he would put in the category of imposters the

"interpreters and ordinary controllers of the designs of God, setting about to find the causes of each accident, and to see in the secrets of the divine will the incomprehensible motives of its works."

This, again, is a recurrent note with Montaigne; and much of the argument of theApologyis typified in the sentence:—

"What greater vanity can there be than to go about by our proportions and conjectures to guess at God?"

(c) But there is a yet more striking coincidence between a passage in the essay103ofJudging of Others' Deathand the speech of Edmund104on the subject of stellar influences. In the essay Montaigne sharply derides the habit of ascribing human occurrences to the interference of the stars—which very superstition he was later to support by his own authority in theApology, as we have seen above, in the passage on the "power and domination" of the celestial bodies. The passage in the thirteenth essay is the more notable in itself, being likewise a protest against human self-sufficiency, though the bearing of the illustration is directly reversed. Here he derides man's conceit: "We entertain and carry all with us: whence it followeth that we deem our death to be some great matter, and which passeth not so easily, nor without a solemn consultation of the stars." Then follow references to Cæsar's sayings as to his star, and the "common foppery" as to the sun mourning his death a year.

"And a thousand such, wherewith the world suffers itself to be so easily cony-catched, deeming that our own interests disturb heaven, and his infinity is moved at our least actions. 'There is no such society betweenheaven and us that by our destiny the shining of the stars should be as mortal as we are.'"

There seems to be an unmistakable reminiscence of this passage in Edmund's speech, where the word "foppery" is a special clue:

"This is the excellent foppery of the world! that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behaviour), we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and traitors by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by divine thrusting on...."

(d) Again, inMacbeth(1606), the words of Malcolm to Macduff105:

"Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak,Whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break"

—an idea which also underlies Macbeth's "this perilous stuff, which weighs upon the heart"—recalls the essay106Of Sadness, in which Montaigne remarks on the

"mournful silent stupidity which so doth pierce us when accidents surpassing our strength overwhelm us," and on the way in which "the soul, bursting afterwards forth into tears and complaints ... seemeth to clear and dilate itself"; going on to tell how the GermanLord Raisciac looked on his dead son "till the vehemency of his sad sorrow, having suppressed and choked his vital spirits, felled him stark dead to the ground."

The parallel here, such as it is, is at least much more vivid than that drawn between Shakspere's lines and one of Seneca:

Curae leves loquuntur: ingentes stupent107—"Light troubles speak: the great ones are dumb."

Certainly no one of these latter passages would singly suffice to prove that Shakspere had read Montaigne, though the peculiar coincidence of one word in Edgar's speech with a word in Florio, above noted, would alone raise the question. But even had Shakspere not passed, as we shall see cause to acknowledge, beyond the most melancholy mood of Montaigne into one of far sterner and more stringent pessimism, an absence or infrequency of suggestions of Montaigne in the plays between 1605 and 1610 would be a very natural result of Jonson's gibe inVolpone. That gibe, indeed, is not really so ill-natured as the term "steal" is apt to make it sound for our ears, especially if we are prepossessed—as even Mr. Fleay still seems to be—by the old commentators' notion of a deep ill-will on Jonson's part towards Shakspere. There was probably no such ill-will in the matter, the burly scholar's habit of robust banter being enough to account for the form of his remark. As a matter of fact, his own plays are strewn with classic transcriptions; and though he evidently plumed himself on his power of "invention"108in the matter of plots—a faculty which he knew Shakspere to lack—he cannot conceivably have meant to charge his rival with having committed any discreditable plagiarism in drawing upon Montaigne. At most he would mean to convey that borrowing from the English translation of Montaigne was an easy game as compared with his own scholar-like practice of translating from the Greek and Latin, and from out-of-the-way authors, too.

However that might be, the fact stands that Shakspere did about 1604 reproduce Montaigne as we have seen; and it remains to consider what the reproduction signifies, as regards Shakspere's mental development.

But first there has to be asked the question whether the Montaigne influence is unique or exceptional. Of the many literary influences which an Elizabethan dramatist might undergo, was Montaigne's the only one which wrought deeply upon Shakspere's spirit, apart from those of his contemporary dramatists and the pre-existing plays, which were then models and points of departure? It is clear that Shakspere must have thought much and critically of the methods and the utterance of his co-rivals in literary art, as he did of the methods of his fellow-actors. The author of the advice to the players inHamletwas hardly less a critic than a poet; and the sonnet110which speaks of its author as

"Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,"

is one of the least uncertain revelations that these enigmatic poems yield us. We may confidently decide, too, with Professor Minto,109that the Eighty-sixth Sonnet, beginning:

"Was it the full, proud sail of his great verse?"

has reference to Chapman, in whom Shakspere might well see one of his most formidable competitors in poetry. But we are here concerned with influences of thought, as distinct from influences of artistic example; and the question is: Do the plays show any other culture-contact comparable to that which we have been led to recognise in the case of Montaigne's Essays?

The matter cannot be said to have been very fully investigated when even the Montaigne influence has been thus far left so much in the vague. As regards the plots, there has been exhaustive and instructive research during two centuries; and of collations of parallel passages, apart from Montaigne, there has been no lack; but the deeper problem of the dramatist's mental history can hardly be said to have arisen till our own generation. As regards many of the parallel passages, the ground has been pretty well cleared by the dispassionate scholarship brought to bear on them from Farmer onwards; though the idolatry of the Coleridgean school, as represented by Knight, did much to retard scientific conclusions on this as on other points.

Farmer's Essay on the Learning of Shakspere (1767) proved for all open-minded readers that much of Shakspere's supposed classical knowledge was derived from translations alone;111and further investigation does but establish his general view.112Such is the effect of M. Stapfer's chapter on Shakspere's Classical Knowledge;113and the pervading argument of that chapter will be found to hold good as against the view suggested, with judicious diffidence, by Dr. John W. Cunliffe, concerning the influence of Seneca's tragedies on Shakspere's. Unquestionably the body of Senecan tragedy, as Dr. Cunliffe's valuable research has shown, did much to colour the style and thought of the Elizabethan drama, aswell as to suggest its themes and shape its technique. But it is noteworthy that while there are in the plays, as we have seen, apparent echoes from the Senecan treatises, and while, as we have seen, Dr. Cunliffe suggests sources for some Shaksperean passages in the Senecan tragedies, he is doubtful as to whether they represent any direct study of Seneca by Shakspere.

"Whether Shakspere was directly indebted to Seneca," he writes, "is a question as difficult as it is interesting. As English tragedy advances, there grows up an accumulation of Senecan influence within the English drama, in addition to the original source, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the direct and the indirect influence of Seneca. In no case is the difficulty greater than in that of Shakspere. Of Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, Marston, and Massinger, we can say with certainty that they read Seneca, and reproduced their readings in their tragedies; of Middleton and Heywood we can say with almost equal certainty that they give no sign of direct indebtedness to Seneca; and that they probably came only under the indirect influence, through the imitations of their predecessors and contemporaries. In the case of Shakspere we cannot be absolutely certain either way. Professor Baynes thinks it is probable that Shakspere read Seneca at school; and even if he did not, we may be sure that, at some period of his career, he wouldturn to the generally accepted model of classical tragedy, either in the original or in the translation."114

This seems partially inconsistent; and, so far as the evidence from particular parallels goes, we are not led to take with any confidence the view put in the last sentence. The above-noted parallels between Seneca's tragedies and Shakspere's are but cases of citation of sentences likely to have grown proverbial; and the most notable of the others that have been cited by Dr. Cunliffe is one which, as he notes, points to Æschylus as well as to Seneca. The cry of Macbeth:

"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this bloodClean from my hand? No, this my hand will ratherThe multitudinous seas incarnadine,Making the green one red:"

certainly corresponds closely with that of Seneca's Hercules:115

"Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis persicaViolentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus feroxTagusve ibera turbidus gaza fluens,Abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licetMæotis in me gelida transfundat mare,Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus,Haerebit altum facinus"

and that of Seneca's Hippolytus:116

"Quis eluet me Tanais? Aut quae barbaris,Mæotis undis pontico incumbens mari.Non ipso toto magnus Oceano paterTantum expiarit sceleris."

But these declamations, deriving as they do, to begin with, from Æschylus,117are seen from their very recurrence in Seneca to have become stock speeches for the ancient tragic drama; and they were clearly well-fitted to become so for the mediæval. The phrases used were already classic when Catullus employed them before Seneca:

"Suscipit, O Gelli, quantum non ultima ThetysNon genitor Nympharum, abluit Oceanus."118

In the Renaissance we find the theme reproduced by Tasso;119and it had doubtless been freely used by Shakspere's English predecessors and contemporaries. What he did was but to set the familiar theme to a rhetoric whose superb sonority must have left theirs tame, as it leaves Seneca's stilted in comparison. Marston did his best with it, in a play which mayhave been written before, though published after,Macbeth120:—

"Although the waves of all the Northern seaShould flow for ever through those guilty hands,Yet the sanguinolent stain would extant be"

—a sad foil to Shakspere's

"The multitudinous seas incarnadine."

It is very clear, then, that we are not here entitled to suppose Shakspere a reader of the Senecan tragedies; and even were it otherwise, the passage in question is a figure of speech rather than a reflection on life or a stimulus to such reflection. And the same holds good of the other interesting but inconclusive parallels drawn by Dr. Cunliffe. Shakspere's

"Diseases desperate grownBy desperate appliance are relieved,Or not at all,"121

which he compares with Seneca's

"Et ferrum et ignis sæpe medicinæ loco est.Extrema primo nemo tentavit loco,"122

—a passage that may very well be the original for the modern oracle about fire and iron—is really much closer to the aphorism of Hippocrates, that "Extreme remedies are proper for extreme diseases," and cannot be said to be more than a proverb. In any case, it lay to Shakspere's hand in Montaigne,123as translated by Florio:

"To extreme sicknesses, extreme remedies."

Equally inconclusive is the equally close parallel between Macbeth's

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?"

and the sentence of Hercules:

"Nemo polluto queatAnimo mederi."124

Such a reflection was sure to secure a proverbial vogue, and inThe Two Noble Kinsmen(in which Shakspere indeed seems to have had a hand), we have the doctor protesting: "I think she has a perturbed mind, which I cannot minister to."125

And so, again, with the notable resemblance between Hercules' cry:

"Cur animam in ista luce detineam amplius,Morerque, nihil est. Cuncta jam amisi bona,Mentem, arma, famem, conjugam, natos, manus,Etiam furorem."126

and Macbeth's:

"I have lived long enough: my way of lifeIs fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf;And that which should accompany old age,As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,I must not look to have."127

Here there is indeed every appearance of imitation; but, though the versification in Macbeth's speech is certainly Shakspere's, such a lament had doubtless been made in other English plays, in direct reproduction of Seneca; and Shakspere, in all probability, was again only perfecting some previous declamation.

There is a quite proverbial quality, finally, in such phrases as:

"Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upwardTo that they were before;"128

and

"We but teachBloody instructions, which, being taught, returnTo plague the inventor."129

—which might be traced to other sources nearer Shakspere's hand than Seneca. And beyond such sentences and such tropes as those above considered, there was really little or nothing inthe tragedies of Seneca to catch Shakspere's eye or ear; nothing to generate in him a deep philosophy of life or to move him to the manifold play of reflection which gives his later tragedies their commanding intellectuality. Some such stimulus, as we have seen, he might indeed have drawn from one or two of Seneca's treatises, which do, in their desperately industrious manner, cover a good deal of intellectual ground, making some tolerable discoveries by the way. But by the tests alike of quantity and quality of reproduced matter, it is clear that the indirect influence of the Senecan tragedies and treatises on Shakspere was slight compared with the direct influence of Montaigne's essays. Nor is it hard to see why; even supposing Shakspere to have had Seneca at hand in translation. Despite Montaigne's own leaning to Seneca, as compared with Cicero, we may often say of the former what Montaigne says of the latter, that "his manner of writing seemeth very tedious." Over theDe Beneficiisand theDe Iraone is sometimes moved to say, as the essayist does130over Cicero, "I understand sufficiently what deathand voluptuousness are; let not a man busy himself to anatomise them." For the swift and penetrating flash of Montaigne, which either goes to the heart of a matter once for all or opens up a far vista of feeling and speculation, leaving us newly related to our environment and even to our experience, Seneca can but give us a conscientious examination of the ground, foot by foot, with a policeman's lantern, leaving us consciously footsore, eyesore, and ready for bed. Under no stress of satisfaction from his best finds can we be moved to call him a man of genius, which is just what we call Montaigne after a few pages. It is the broad difference between industry and inspiration, between fecundity and pregnancy, between Jonson and Shakspere. And, though a man of genius is not necessarily dependent on other men of genius for stimulus, we shall on scrutiny find reason to believe that in Shakspere's case the nature of the stimulus counted for a great deal.

Even before that is made clear, however, there can be little hesitation about dismissing the only other outstanding theory of a special intellectual influence undergone by Shakspere—thetheory of Dr. Benno Tschischwitz, that he read and was impressed by the Italian writings of Giordano Bruno. In this case, the bases of the hypothesis are of the scantiest and the flimsiest. Bruno was in England from 1583 to 1586, before Shakspere came to London. Among his patrons were Sidney and Leicester, but neither Southampton nor Pembroke. In all his writings only one passage can be cited which even faintly suggests a coincidence with any in Shakspere; and in that the suggestion is faint indeed. In Bruno's ill-famed comedyIl Candelajo, Octavio asks the pedant Manfurio, "Che e la materia di vostri versi," and the pedant replies, "Litteræ, syllabæ, dictio et oratio, partes propinquæ et remotæ," on which Octavio again asks: "Io dico, quale e il suggetto et il proposito."131So far as it goes this is something of a parallel to Polonius's question to Hamlet as to what he reads, and Hamlet's answer, "Words, words." But the scene is obviously a stock situation; and if there are any passages inHamletwhich clearly belong to the pre-Shaksperean play, the fooling of Hamletwith Polonius is one of them. And beyond this, Dr. Tschischwitz's parallels are flatly unconvincing, or rather they promptly put themselves out of court. He admits that nothing else in Bruno's comedy recalls anything else in Shakspere;132but he goes on to find analogies between other passages inHamletand some of Bruno's philosophic doctrines. Quoting Bruno's theorem that all things are made up of indestructible atoms, and that death is but a transformation, Dr. Tschischwitz cites as a reproduction of it Hamlet's soliloquy:

"O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!"

It is difficult to be serious over such a contention; and it is quite impossible for anybody out of Germany or the Bacon-Shakspere party to be as serious over it as Dr. Tschischwitz, who finds that Hamlet's figure of the melting of flesh into dew is an illustration of Bruno's "atomic system," and goes on to find a further Brunonian significance in Hamlet's jeering answers to the king's demand for the body of Polonius. Ofthese passages he finds the source or suggestion in one which he translates from Bruno'sCena de le Ceneri:—

"For to this matter, of which our planet is formed, death and dissolution do not come; and the annihilation of all nature is not possible; but it attains from time to time, by a fixed law, to renew itself and to change all its parts, rearranging and recombining them; all this necessarily taking place in a determinate series, under which everything assumes the place of another."133

In the judgment of Dr. Tschischwitz, this theorem, which anticipates so remarkably the modern scientific conception of the universe, "elucidates" Hamlet's talk about worms and bodies, and his further sketch of the progress of Alexander's dust to the plugging of a beer-barrel. It seems unnecessary to argue that all this is the idlest supererogation. The passages cited fromHamlet, all of them found in the First Quarto, might have been drafted by a much lesser man than Shakspere, and that without ever having heard of Bruno or the theory of the indestructibility of matter. There is nothing in the case approaching to a reproduction of Bruno's far-reaching thought; whileon the contrary the "leave not a wrack behind," in theTempest, is an expression which sets aside, as if it were unknown, the conception of an endless transmutation of matter, in a context where the thought would naturally suggest itself to one who had met with it. Where Hamlet is merely sardonic in the plane of popular or at least exoteric humour, Dr. Tschischwitz credits him with pantheistic philosophy. Where, on the other hand, Hamlet speaks feelingly and ethically of the serious side of drunkenness,134Dr. Tschischwitz parallels the speech with a sentence in theBestia Trionfante, which gives a merely Rabelaisian picture of drunken practices.135Yet again, he puts Bruno's large aphorism, "Sol et homo generant hominem," beside Hamlet's gibe about the sun breeding maggots in a dead dog—a phrase possible to any euphuist of the period. That the parallels amount at best to little, Dr. Tschischwitz himself indirectly admits, though he proceeds to a new extravagance of affirmation:

"We do not maintain that such expressions are philosophemes, or that Shakspere otherwise went anydeeper into Bruno's system than suited his purpose, but that such passages show Shakspere, at the time of his writing ofHamlet, to have already reached the heights of the thought of the age (Zeitbewusstsein), and to have made himself familiar with the most abstract of the sciences. Many hitherto almost unintelligible passages inHamletare now cleared up by the poet's acquaintance with the atomic philosophy and the writings of the Nolan."

All this belongs to the uncritical method of the German Shakspere-criticism of the days before Rümelin. It is quite possible that Shakspere may have heard something of Bruno's theories from his friends; and we may be sure that much of Bruno's teaching would have profoundly interested him. If Bruno's lectures at Oxford on the immortality of the soul included the matter he published later on the subject, they may have called English attention to the Pythagorean lore concerning the fate of the soul after death,136above cited from Montaigne. We might again, on Dr. Tschischwitz's lines, trace the verses on the "shaping fantasies" of "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet," in theMidsummer Night's Dream,137to such a passage in Bruno as this:—

"The first and most capital painter is the vivacity of the phantasy; the first and most capital poet is the inspiration that originally arises with the impulse of deep thought, or is set up by that, through the divine or akin-to-divine breath of which they feel themselves moved to the fit expression of their thoughts. For each it creates the other principle. Therefore are the philosophers in a certain sense painters; the poets, painters and philosophers; the painters, philosophers and poets: true poets, painters, and philosophers love and reciprocally admire each other. There is no philosopher who does not poetise and paint. Therefore is it said, not without reason: To understand is to perceive the figures of phantasy, and understanding is phantasy, or is nothing without it."138

But since Shakspere does not recognisably echo a passage which he would have been extremely likely to produce in such a context, had he known it, we are bound to decide that he had not even heard it cited, much less read it. And so with any other remote resemblances between his work and that of any author whom he may have read. In regard even to passages in Shakspere which come much nearer their originals than any of these above cited come to Bruno, we are forced to decide that Shakspere got his thought at second or third hand. Thusthe famous passage inHenry V.,139in which the Archbishop figures the State as a divinely framed harmony of differing functions, is clearly traceable to Plato'sRepublicand Cicero'sDe Republica; yet rational criticism must decide with M. Stapfer140that Shakspere knew neither of these treatises, but got his suggestion from some English translation or citation.

In fine, we are constrained by all our knowledge concerning Shakspere, as well as by the abstract principles of proof, to regard him in general as a reader of his own language only, albeit not without a smattering of others; and among the books in his own language which we know him to have read in, and can prove him to have been influenced by, we come back to Montaigne's Essays, as by far the most important and the most potential for suggestion and provocation.

To have any clear idea, however, of what Montaigne did or could do for Shakspere, we must revise our conception of the poet in the light of the positive facts of his life and circumstances—a thing made difficult for us in England through the transcendental direction given to our Shakspere lore by those who first shaped it sympathetically, to wit, Coleridge and the Germans. An adoring idea of Shakspere, as a mind of unapproachable superiority, has thus become so habitual with most of us that it is difficult to reduce our notion to terms of normal individuality, of character and mind as we know them in life. When we read Coleridge, Schlegel, and Gervinus, or even the admirable essay of Charles Lamb, or the eloquent appreciations of Mr. Swinburne, or such eulogists as Hazlitt and Knight, we are in a world of abstract æsthetics or of abstract ethics; we are not within sight of the man Shakspere, who became an actor for alivelihood in an age when the best actors played in inn-yards for rude audiences, mostly illiterate and not a little brutal; then added to his craft of acting the craft of play-patching and refashioning; who had his partnership share of the pence and sixpences paid by the mob of noisy London prentices and journeymen and idlers that filled the booth theatre in which his company performed; who sued his debtors rigorously when they did not settle-up; worked up old plays or took a hand in new, according as the needs of his concern and his fellow-actors dictated; and finally went with his carefully collected fortune to spend his last years in ease and quiet in the country town in which he was born. Our sympathetic critics, even when, like Dr. Furnivall, they know absolutely all the archæological facts as to theatrical life in Shakspere's time, do not seem to bring those facts into vital touch with their æsthetic estimate of his product; they remain under the spell of Coleridge and Gervinus.141Emerson, it is true,protested at the close of his essay that he "could not marry this fact," of Shakspere's being a jovial actor and manager, "to his verse;" but that deliverance has served only as a text for those who have embraced the fantastic tenet that Shakspere was but the theatrical agent and representative of Bacon; a delusion of which the vogue may be partly traced to the lack of psychological solidity in the ordinary presentment of Shakspere by his admirers. The heresy, of course, merely leaps over the difficulty, intoabsolute irrelevance. Emerson was intellectually to blame in that, seeing as he did the hiatus between the poet's life and the prevailing conception of his verse, he did not try to conceive it all anew, but rather resigned himself to the solution that Shakspere's mind was out of human ken. "A good reader can in a sort nestle into Plato's brain and think from thence," he said; "but not into Shakspere's; we are still out of doors." We should indeed remain so for ever did we not set about patiently picking the locks where the transcendentalist has dreamily turned away.

It is imperative that we should recommence vigilantly with the concrete facts, ignoring all the merely æsthetic and metaphysic syntheses. Where Coleridge and Schlegel more or less ingeniously invite us to acknowledge a miraculous artistic perfection, where Lamb more movingly gives forth the intense vibration aroused in his spirit by Shakspere's ripest work, we must turn back to track down the youth from Stratford; son of a burgess once prosperous, but destined to sink steadily in the world; married at eighteen, under pressure of circumstances,with small prospect of income, to the woman of twenty-five; ill at ease in that position; and at length, having made friends with a travelling company of actors, come to London to earn a living in any tolerable way by means of his moderate education, his "small Latin and less Greek," his knack of fluent rhyming, and his turn for play-acting. To know him as he began we must measure him narrowly by his first performances. These are not to be looked for in even the earliest of his plays, not one of which can be taken to represent his young and unaided faculty, whether as regards construction or diction. Collaboration, the natural resort of the modern dramatist, must have been to some extent forced on him in those years by the nature of his situation; and after all that has been said by adorers of the quality of his wit and his verse in such early comedies asLove's Labour LostandThe Two Gentlemen of Verona, the critical reader is apt to be left pretty evenly balanced between the two reflections that the wit and the versification have indeed at times a certain happy naturalness of their own, and that nevertheless, if they reallybe Shakspere's throughout, the most remarkable thing in the matter is his later progress. But even apart from such disputable issues, we may safely say with Mr. Fleay that "there is not a play of his that can be referred even on the rashest conjecture to a date anterior to 1594, which does not bear the plainest internal evidence of having been refashioned at a later time."142These plays, then, with all their evidences of immaturity, of what Mr. Bagehot called "clever young-mannishness," cannot serve us as safe measures of Shakspere's mind at the beginning of his career.

But it happens that we have such a measure in performances which, since they imply no technical arrangement, are of a homogenous literary substance, and can be shown to be the work of a man brought up in the Warwickshire dialect,143are not even challenged, I believe, by the adherents of the Baconian faith. The tasks which the greatest of our poets set himself when near the age of thirty, and to which he presumably brought all the powers of which he was thenconscious, were the uninspired and pitilessly prolix poems ofVenus and AdonisandThe Rape of Lucrece, the first consisting of some 1,200 lines and the second of more than 1,800; one a calculated picture of female concupiscence and the other a still more calculated picture of female chastity: the two alike abnormally fluent, yet external, unimpassioned, endlessly descriptive, elaborately unimpressive. Save for the sexual attraction of the subjects, on the commercial side of which the poet had obviously reckoned in choosing them, these performances could have no unstudious readers in our day and few warm admirers in their own, so little sign do they give of any high poetic faculty save the two which singly go so often without any determining superiority of mind—inexhaustible flow of words and endless observation of concrete detail. Of the countless thrilling felicities of phrase and feeling for which Shakspere is renowned above all English poets, not one, I think, is to be found in those three thousand fluently-scanned and smoothly-worded lines: on the contrary, the wearisome succession of stanzas, stretching the succinct themesimmeasurably beyond all natural fitness and all narrative interest, might seem to signalise such a lack of artistic judgment as must preclude all great performance; while the apparent plan of producing an effect by mere multiplication of words, mere extension of description without intension of idea, might seem to prove a lack of capacity for any real depth of passion. They were simply manufactured poems, consciously constructed for the market, the first designed at the same time to secure the patronage of the Mæcenas of the hour, Lord Southampton, to whom it was dedicated, and the second produced and similarly dedicated on the strength of the success of the first. The point here to be noted is that they gained the poet's ends. They succeeded as saleable literature, and they gained the Earl's favour.

And the rest of the poet's literary career, from this point forward, seems to have been no less prudently calculated. Having plenty of evidence that men could not make a living by poetry, even if they produced it with facility; and that they could as little count on living steadily by the sale of plays, he joined with histrade of actor the business not merely of playwright but of part-sharer in the takings of the theatre. The presumption from all we know of the commercial side of the play-making of the times is that, for whatever pieces Shakspere touched up, collaborated in, or composed for his company, he received a certain payment once for all;144since there was no reason why his partners should treat his plays differently in this regard from the plays they bought of other men. Doubtless, when his reputation was made, the payments would be considerable. But the main source of his income, or rather of the accumulations with which he bought land and house and tithes at Stratford, must have been his share in the takings of the theatre—a share which would doubtless increase as the earlier partners disappeared. He must have speedily become the principal man in the firm, combining as he did the work of composer, reviser, and adaptor of plays with that of actor and working partner. We are thus dealing with a temperament or mentality not at all obviously original ormasterly, not at all conspicuous at the outset for intellectual depth or seriousness, not at all obtrusive of its "mission;" but exhibiting simply a gift for acting, an abundant faculty of rhythmical speech, and a power of minute observation, joined with a thoroughly practical or commercial handling of the problem of life, in a calling not usually taken-to by commercially-minded men. What emerges for us thus far is the conception of a very plastic intelligence, a good deal led and swayed by immediate circumstances; but at bottom very sanely related to life, and so possessing a latent faculty for controlling its destinies; not much cultured, not profound, not deeply passionate; not particularly reflective though copious in utterance; a personality which of itself, if under no pressure of pecuniary need, would not be likely to give the world any serious sign of mental capacity whatever.

In order, then, that such a man as this should develop into the Shakspere of the great tragedies and tragic comedies, there must concur two kinds of life-conditions with those already noted—the fresh conditions of deeply-moving experience and of deep intellectual stimulus. Withoutthese, such a mind would no more arrive at the highest poetic and dramatic capacity than, lacking the spur of necessity or of some outside call, it would be moved to seek poetic and dramatic utterance for its own relief. There is no sign here of an innate burden of thought, bound to be delivered; there is only the sensitive plate or responsive faculty, capable of giving back with peculiar vividness and spontaneity every sort of impression which may be made on it. The faculty, in short, which could produce those 3,000 fluent lines on the bare data of the stories of Venus and Adonis and Tarquin and Lucrece, with only the intellectual material of a rakish Stratford lad's schooling and reading, and the culture coming of a few years' association with the primitive English stage and its hangers-on, was capable of broadening and deepening, with vital experience and vital culture, into the poet ofLearandMacbeth. But the vital culture must come to it, like the experience: this was not a man who would go out of his way to seek the culture. A man so minded, a man who would bear hardship in order to win knowledge, would not have settled down so easily into theactor-manager with a good share in the company's profits. There is almost nothing to show that the young Shakspere read anything save current plays, tales, and poems. Such a notable book as North'sPlutarch, published in 1579, does not seem to have affected his literary activity till about the year 1600: and even then the subject ofJulius Cæsarmay have been suggested to him by some other play-maker, as was the case with his chronicle histories. In his contemporary, Ben Jonson, we do have the type of the young man bent on getting scholarship as the best thing possible to him. The bricklayer's apprentice, unwillingly following the craft of his stepfather, sticking obstinately all the while to his Horace and his Homer, resolute to keep and to add to the humanities he had learned in the grammar school, stands out clearly alongside of the other, far less enthusiastic for knowledge and letters, but also far more plastically framed, and at the same time far more clearly alive to the seriousness of the struggle for existence as a matter of securing the daily bread-and-butter. It may be, indeed—who knows—that but for that peculiarly earlymarriage, with its consequent family responsibilities, Shakspere would have allowed himself a little more of youthful breathing-time: it may be that it was the existence of Ann Hathaway and her three children that made him a seeker for pelf rather than a seeker for knowledge in the years between twenty and thirty, when the concern for pelf sits lightly on most intellectual men. The thesis undertaken inLove's Labour Lost—that the truly effective culture is that of life in the world rather than that of secluded study—perhaps expresses a process of inward and other debate in which the wish has become father to the thought. Scowled upon by jealous collegians like Greene for presuming, actor as he was, to write dramas, he must have asked himself whether there was not something to be gained from such schooling as theirs.145But then he certainly made more than was needed to keep the Stratford household going; and the clear shallow flood ofVenus and Adonisand theRape of Lucrecestands for ever to show how far from tragic consciousness was the younghusband and father when close upon thirty years old. It was in 1596 that his little Hamnet died at Stratford; and there is nothing to show, says Mr. Fleay,146that Shakspere had ever been there in the interval between his departure in 1587 and the child's funeral.

But already, it may be, some vital experience had come. Whatever view we take of the drama of the sonnets, we may so far adopt Mr. Fleay's remarkable theory147as to surmise that the central episode of faithless love occurred about 1594. If so, here was enough to deepen and impassion the plastic personality of the rhymer ofVenus and Adonis; to add a new string to the heretofore Mercurial lyre. All the while, too, he was undergoing the kind of culture and of psychological training involved in his craft of acting—a culture involving a good deal of contact with the imaginative literature of the Renaissance, so far as then translated, and a psychological training of great though little recognised importance to the dramatist. It seemsobvious that the practice of acting, by a plastic and receptive temperament, capable of manifold appreciation, must have counted for much in developing the faculties at once of sympathy and expression. In this respect Shakspere stood apart from his rivals, with their merely literary training. And in point of fact, we do find in his plays, year by year, a strengthening sense of the realities of human nature, despite their frequently idealistic method of portraiture, the verbalism and factitiousness of much of their wit, and their conventionality of plot. Above all things, the man who drew so many fancifully delightful types of womanhood must have been intensely appreciative of the charm of sex; and it is on that side that we are to look for his first contacts with the deeper forces of life. What marks off the Shakspere of thirty-five, in fine, from all his rivals, is just his peculiarly true and new148expression of the living grace of womanhood, always, it is true, abstracted to the form of poetry and skilfully purified from the blemishes of the actual, but none the less convincing and stimulating. We are here in presence at once of a rare receptive faculty and a rare expressive faculty: the plastic organism of the first poems touched through and through with a hundred vibrations of deeper experience; the external and extensive method gradually ripening into an internal and intensive; the innate facility of phrase and alertness of attention turned from the physical to the psychical. But still it is to the psychics of sex, for the most part, that we are limited. Of the deeps of human nature, male nature, as apart from the love of woman, the playwright still shows no special perception, save in the vivid portrait of Shylock, the exasperated Jew. The figures in which we can easily recognise his hand in the earlier historical plays are indeed marked by his prevailing sanity of perception; always they show the play of the seeing eye, the ruling sense of reality which shaped his life; it is this visible actuality that best marks them off from the non-Shaksperean figures around them. And in the wonderful figures of Falstaff and his group we have a roundness of comic reality to which nothing else in modern literature thusfar could be compared. But still this, the most remarkable of all, remains comic reality; and, what is more, it is a comic reality of which, as in the rest of his work, the substratum was pre-Shaksperean. For it is clear that the figure of Falstaff, as Oldcastle, had been popularly successful before Shakspere took hold of it:149and what he did here, as elsewhere, with his uninventive mind, in which the faculty of imagination always rectified and expanded rather than originated types and actions, was doubtless to give the hues and tones of perfect life to the half-real inventions of others. This must always be insisted on as the special psychological characteristic of Shakspere. Excepting in the doubtful case ofLove's Labour Lost, he never invented a plot; his male characters are almost always developments from an already sketched original; it is in drawing his heroines, where he is most idealistic, that he seems to have been most independently creative, his originals here being doubtless the women who had charmed him, set living in ideal scenes to charm others. And it resulted from this specialty of structurethat the greater reality of his earlier male historic figures, as compared with those of most of his rivals, is largely a matter of saner and more felicitous declamation—the play of his great and growing faculty of expression—since he had no more special knowledge of the types in hand than had his competitors. It is only when his unequalled receptive faculty has been acted upon by a peculiarly concentrated and readily assimilated body of culture, the English translation by Sir Thomas North of Amyot's French translation of Plutarch's Lives, that we find Shakspere incontestably superior to his contemporaries in the virile treatment of virile problems no less than in the sympathetic rendering of emotional charm and tenderness and the pathos of passion. The tragedy ofRomeo and Juliet, with all its burning fervours and swooning griefs, remains for us a picture of the luxury of woe: it is truly said of it that it is not fundamentally unhappy. But inJulius Cæsarwe have touched a further depth of sadness. For the moving tragedy of circumstance, of lovers sundered by fate only to be swiftly joined in exultant death, we have the profounder tragedyof mutually destroying energies, of grievously miscalculating men, of failure and frustration dogging the steps of the strenuous and the wise, of destiny searching out the fatal weakness of the strong. To the poet has now been added the reader; to the master of the pathos of passion the student of the tragedy of universal life. It is thus by culture and experience—culture limited but concentrated, and experience limited but intense—that the man Shakspere has been intelligibly made into the dramatist Shakspere as we find him when he comes to his greatest tasks. For the formation of the supreme artist there was needed alike the purely plastic organism and the special culture to which it was so uniquely fitted to respond; culture that came without search, and could be undergone as spontaneously as the experience of life itself; knowledge that needed no more wooing than Ann Hathaway, or any dubious angel in the sonnets. In the English version of Plutarch'sLives, pressed upon him doubtless by the play-making plans of other men, Shakspere found the most effectively concentrated history of ancient humanity that could possibly have reached him;and he responded to the stimulus with all his energy of expression because he received it so freely and vitally, in respect alike of his own plasticity and the fact that the vehicle of the impression was his mother tongue. It is plain that to the last he made no secondary study of antiquity. He made blunders which alone might warn the Baconians off their vain quest: he had no notion of chronology: finding Cato retrospectively spoken of by Plutarch as one to whose ideal Coriolanus had risen, he makes a comrade of Coriolanus say it, as if Cato were a dead celebrity in Coriolanus' day; just as he makes Hector quote Aristotle in Troy. These clues are not to be put aside with æsthetic platitudes: they are capital items in our knowledge of the man. And if even the idolator feels perturbed by their obtrusion, he has but to reflect that where the trained scholars around Shakspere reproduced antiquity with greater accuracy in minor things, tithing the mint and anise and cumin of erudition, they gave us of the central human forces, which it was their special business to realise, mere hollow and tedious parodies. Jonson was a scholar whose varietyof classic reading might have constituted him a specialist to-day; but Jonson's ancients are mostly dead for us, even as are Jonson's moderns, because they are the expression of a psychic faculty which could neither rightly perceive reality, nor rightly express what it did perceive. He represents industry in art without inspiration. The two contrasted pictures, of Jonson writing out his harangues in prose in order to turn them into verse, and of Shakspere giving his lines unblotted to the actors—speaking in verse, in the white heat of his cerebration, as spontaneously as he breathed—these historic data, which happen to be among the most perfectly certified that we possess concerning the two men, give us at once half the secret of one and all the secret of the other. Jonson had the passion for book knowledge, the patience for hard study, the faculty for plot-invention; and withal he produced dramatic work which gives little or no permanent pleasure. Shakspere had none of these characteristics; and yet, being the organism he was, it only needed the culture which fortuitously reached him in his own tongue to make him successively the greatestdramatic master of eloquence, mirth, charm, tenderness, passion, pathos, pessimism, and philosophic serenity that literature can show, recognisably so even though his work be almost constantly hampered by the framework of other men's enterprises, which he was so singularly content to develop or improve. Hence the critical importance of following up the culture which evolved him, and above all, that which finally touched him to his most memorable performance.

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