BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 FROM THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 X891 
 
 A iK5:.qH^ il^lo..s.. 
 
: ;0V 
 
 ■The dftte shows when this volume was taken. 
 
 Jm All books not in use 
 
 ^ for instruction or re- 
 
 search are limited to 
 all borrowers. 
 11^.-. Volumes of periodi- 
 
 ^MPf^ cals and of pamphlets 
 
 comprise so many sub- 
 jects, that they are held 
 in the library as much 
 as {iDssible. For spe- 
 cial purposes Ihey are 
 gfiven out for a limited 
 time. 
 
 Graduates and sen- 
 iors are allowed five 
 volumes for two weeks. 
 ■ Other students inay 
 have tw^ vqIs. from the 
 aO V) circulating library for 
 
 iK/lC^ *^° we^s. ' 
 
 liAV ' r\ n .Books not needed 
 
 MAY 9 2006 during recess periods 
 
 should be returned to 
 the library, or arrange- 
 ments tnade for their 
 return during borrow- 
 er's absence, if wanted. 
 Books needed' by 
 more than one pierson 
 are held on the reserve 
 list. 
 
 Books of special , 
 value and gift books, 
 when the giver wishes 
 it, ^re ^ot allowed to 
 circulate. 
 
 ■IWAY-JO 1932 
 
 PR 2909.09™" """"""y-lbrary 
 ..SI'.f.ifMPeare-s Story of his life, 
 
The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013150820 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S 
 
 STORY OF HIS LIFE 
 
PUBLISHER'S AMODNGEMENT. 
 
 GIOVANNI COSTA : HIS 
 LIFE, WORK, & TIMES 
 
 BY 
 OLIVIA ROSSETTI AGRESTI. 
 
 WITH PHOTOGRAVURE FRONTISPIECE 
 AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 Royal %V0, Buckrmn, Gilt, £i : is. net. 
 
 SOCIAL LIFE UNDER 
 THE STUARTS 
 
 BY 
 
 ELIZABETH GODFREY, 
 
 AUTHOR OF' 
 "home ■ LIFE UNDER THE STUARTS," ETC. 
 
 WITH FOUR PHOTOGRAVURES AND 
 SIXTEEN OTHER Il.H'STRATIONS. 
 
 Demy 8va, Cloth, Gilt, 12s. 6d. net. 
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 AND HIS ASSOCIATES 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN H. INGRAM. 
 
 WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS FROM 
 PHOTOGRAPHS OF ORIGINAL DOCU- 
 MENTS, AND A COPIOUS BIBLIO- 
 GRAPHY. 
 
 Demy 8wo, Cloth, Gilt, \2s. 6d. net. 
 
 London : GRANT RICHARDS, 
 48 Leicester Square, W.C. 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S 
 
 STORY OF HIS LIFE 
 
 ,/ BY 
 
 C. CREIGHTON, M.D. 
 
 Alomo. I long 
 
 To hear the story of your life, which must 
 Take the ear strangely. 
 
 Prospero, I'll deliver all. 
 
 The Tempest. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 GRANT RICHARDS 
 
 1904 
 
 3 
 
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGES 
 
 INTRODUCTION 1-14. 
 
 BOOK I 
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S STORY IN THE SONNETS 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 1. The Key to the Sonnets .... 17-31 
 
 2. The Laurel Crown .... 32-44 
 
 3. Mistress Fitton ..... 45-75 
 
 BOOK II 
 PROSPERO'S STORY OF HIS LIFE 
 
 4. Real Personages of 'The Tempest': 1st Series . 79-125 
 
 5. Shakespeare "buys the Reversion of Old Plays" 126-143 
 
 6. Shakespeare's Literary "Devil" — Barnabe Barnes 144-180 
 
 7. Southampton as a Successful Poet . . 181-207 
 
 8. Southampton as Collaborator, 1594-97 . . 208-248 
 
 9. The Quarrel with Southampton . . . 249-271 
 
 V 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S STORY OF HIS LIFE 
 
 CHAP. PAGES 
 
 10. Real Personages of 'The Tempest': znd Series — 
 
 The Jester, the Drunken Butler, and the 
 Boatswain ..... 272-288 
 
 11. Allegories of the Enchanted Island — Ariel, 
 
 Sycorax, Caliban .... 289-309 
 
 BOOK III 
 
 SEQUEL TO THE SONNETS 
 
 12. Achilles in his Tent .... 313-350 
 
 13. Mariana in the Moated Grange . . 351-380 
 
 14. Hamlet's Revenge . . . 381-4.15 
 
 15. The Passive Ophelia .... 416-447 
 
 INDEX 
 
 449-455 
 
 NOTE 
 
 Chapters I.-III. are reprinted, with alterations and additions, from 
 two articles in Blacinvood's Magazine, May and June 1901. The author 
 desires to acknowledge the courtesy of the proprietors of the magazine in 
 granting permission. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 To show the scope of this book, and what the reader 
 may expect to find novel in it, the shortest way will be 
 to tell how it grew in the author's hands, and how the 
 discoveries which it contains came to be made one after 
 another. Four years ago the late Mr. Samuel Butler 
 was good enough to give me a copy of his book on 
 Shakespeare's Sonnets (1899), as he had given me 
 other of his writings which I prized. I read it, at 
 first merely with the view of forming an opinion which I 
 might express to the author ; but soon became interested, 
 indeed fascinated, by the problem of the Sonnets, which 
 I had paid no attention to before, having been always 
 too much repelled by the obscurity of the poems to 
 read any but a few of them. After reading Butler's 
 twelve chapters, from which I gained for the first time 
 a general view of the several theories, including his own, 
 I proceeded, according to his advice, to study the 
 Sonnets themselves, using the original text, which he 
 had conveniently appended to his volume in a facsimile 
 of the precious quarto of 1609. I came soon to agree 
 with my guide that " a story of some sort is staring us 
 in the face " ; but it was not long before I saw that 
 Butler's story of an unscrupulous young fellow named 
 Hews or Hughes would never do, if only for the 
 reason that the youth addressed in the Sonnets was not 
 a scamp, whatever else he was. On turning to the 
 essay of James Boaden (1832), I found that some evi- 
 dence had already been put together, supporting an 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S STORY OF HIS LIFE 
 
 earlier guess of Hey wood Bright (1818), that the youth 
 addressed was William Herbert, afterwards third Earl 
 of Pembroke, " the most universally loved and esteemed 
 of any man of that age " (Clarendon). But Boaden's 
 proof was far from positive, so that no one had been 
 able to press the identification home with confidence, 
 not even the late Mr. Tyler with all his new matter 
 touching the lady in the case. At length I discovered 
 that the proper name Hews in the allusive line of 
 
 S. 20 — 
 
 A man in hew, all Hetos in his controlling — 
 
 which was a stumbling-block to some and a stepping- 
 stone to others (Byron, for example), was really inserted 
 by Shakespeare as a punning clue to the identity of 
 Lord Herbert, one of whose courtesy titles was Lord 
 Fitzhew. This use of one of the Pembroke baronies 
 to pun upon was confirmed by the next discovery, that 
 the frequent use of Rose (as in the opening couplet of 
 the opening sonnet) was also playfully meant in allusion 
 to another of Lord Herbert's titles, Lord Ros of 
 Kendal, which made a good pet name as my lord 
 Rose. Thirdly, I found that the mock-sublime 19th 
 Sonnet, "Devouring Time, blunt thou the Lion's 
 paws," was a witty exercise upon the Pembroke 
 heraldry ; and that the famous " Fair, kind, and true " 
 Sonnet was a series of variations, no less ingenious than 
 elegant, upon two of the Pembroke mottoes — the first 
 half of the sonnet upon the principal motto of the 
 family, Ung je servirai, " I shall keep one " ; the next 
 lines upon the motto of the Parrs (the maternal 
 ancestry), Amour avec loyauti ; whilst the envoi united 
 the two in a climax of witty compliment : 
 
 Fair, kind, and true have often lived alone, 
 Which three till now never kept seat in one. 
 
 By these new proofs I became so confident that Lord 
 Herbert was the man, that I looked for and soon found 
 several sonnets corresponding with known dates in his 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 biography, and with historical events in his youth, such 
 as the death of Spenser on 8th January 1599, and the 
 rebellion of Lord Essex on 8 th February 1601 ; so that 
 it became easy to fix the three years' period over which 
 the Sonnets avowedly ranged as the years from 1598 to 
 1 601. In this time-scheme the series of nine sonnets 
 on the Rival Poet fell in the early summer of 1599, 
 and the real occasion of them, I saw, was the vacancy 
 in the office and pension of the Poet Laureate on the 
 death of Spenser. The rival poet had been guessed by 
 Boaden in 1832 to be Samuel Daniel, on the ground of 
 a risky inference that Daniel must have been mixed up 
 in the necromancies of Dr. Dee and Thomas, Aleyn, 
 and was therefore pointed at in the sonnet with the 
 caustic reference to the other poet's inspiration from 
 nocturnal spirits. Boaden guessed right, and the 
 ground of his guessing was itself good. But he did 
 not see that Daniel's identity is concealed under half 
 a dozen Shakespearian witticisms, including a most 
 ingenious anagram upon his name mingled with the 
 names of the two necromancers — namely, " jdlien pen," 
 the word which was printed in italics with a capital 
 making Daniel without D (Dr. Dee, who had removed 
 to Manchester) but with Aleyn. I was next able to 
 show that Daniel, towards the end of 1599, believed 
 himself to be the new Laureate, but that he never got 
 his patent for the office (as Malone had proved already), 
 although he got some benefice or other emolument 
 from the Queen in lieu of the pension from the Trea- 
 sury. This refusal to Shakespeare of the Laurel Crown, 
 which no one hitherto had detected in the sonnets upon 
 the Rival Poet, accounted for the caustic and impas- 
 sioned series next following, of which the first is " Fare- 
 well, thou art too dear for my possessing." But there 
 was a great deal more behind which I did not discover 
 until a year or two after I first wrote on the Sonnets 
 (without my name, in Blackwood's Magazine^ May and 
 June, 1 901). 
 
 3 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S STORY OF HIS LIFE 
 
 The lady who is addressed in the shorter series of 
 sonnets, printed as an independent sequence after those 
 to Lord Herbert, and who is alluded to also in several 
 of the principal series, was guessed by the late Mr. 
 Thomas Tyler some twenty years ago to have been 
 Mary Fitton, a favourite maid-of-honour of the Queen, 
 It seemed to me that Mr. Tyler's probabilities, stated in 
 his considerate scholarly way, were sufficient for assent ; 
 and it gave me much pleasure to be able to clinch them 
 for him by a documentary proof from outside. The 
 position as he left it in his latest writing was, that Mis- 
 tress Fitton had actually been the mistress of Lord 
 Pembroke, that she resembled in features the Dark 
 Lady of the Sonnets, who had been the poet's mistress 
 and had been stolen from him by his friend, and that 
 her surname was pointed at in one or more punning 
 allusions in the sonnets written to her. But there had 
 been some doubt about her likeness in the portraits at 
 Arbury Hall, Warwickshire, as well as a want of any 
 external evidence that Shakespeare had ever known this 
 lady ; so that Dr. Furnivall, writing in The Theatre on 
 I St December 1897, concluded : "Though the sugges- 
 tion of William Herbert and Mary Fitton is the best 
 yet made, there is nothing like proof or good evidence 
 that they are the folk we want, and there is much 
 evidence against them. Their value is, that they are the 
 types of the persons we are in search of. . . . They 
 have not yet been identified, and probably never will be." 
 
 In using the Calendar of State Papers, I had noticed 
 in the index an entry of the name of Henry, second 
 Earl of Pembroke, as alluded to in a MS. ballad of 
 the year 1601, which I suspected to be a mistake 
 for William Herbert, his son ; and on inspecting the 
 original in the Record Office I saw at once that the 
 ballad contained at least one historical event, the Pro- 
 clamation of 9th February 1601, which was subsequent 
 to the death of the second Earl, and that the allusiori 
 m It to " Pembrooke " was in respect of the very affair 
 
 4 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 of Mistress Fitton, in which William Herbert was 
 known from authentic letters of the same date to have 
 been mixed up. The ballad is in the old rhyming 
 measure of Skelton, written on two sides of a quarto 
 sheet, with a clean copy upon another quarto sheet, 
 both being bound up amongst the ordinary State Papers 
 of the first months of the year 1601. It is a ballad of 
 gossip of Queen Elizabeth's Court, with numerous 
 witty and punning allusions to persons, including the 
 Lord Chamberlain (the second Lord Hunsdon), Sir 
 Robert Cecil ("little Cecil"), and his brother, Lord 
 Burghley (the " burly clown "), Fulke Greville, Sir John 
 Stanhope, the Earl of Bedford, and Sir Walter Raleigh. 
 The second verse is devoted entirely to the scandal in 
 the Maid's Chamber, under the allegory of a startled 
 herd of deer ; it describes the alarm of the Comptroller 
 of the Household, the wrath of the Queen, the ruin of 
 Mistress Fitton, and the relations of two persons to that 
 lady : 
 
 Parti beard was afeard 
 When they ran at the herd. 
 The Raine dear was imboss'd. 
 The white doe she was lost ; 
 Pembrooke strook her down 
 And took her from the clown. 
 Lord, for thy pity ! 
 
 The White Doe is really a very happy descriptive 
 name for Mistress Fitton, as any one may see by her 
 portrait engraved in Lady Newdigate - Newdegate's 
 Gossip from a Muniment Room ; " the clown," from 
 whom Pembroke took her, is, of course, a player ; so 
 that here we have external testimony, of contemporary 
 date, to the very situation of parties in the Sonnets, 
 Lord Pembroke being mentioned by name and the lady 
 under a pet name exactly descriptive of her features, 
 leaving the writer of the Sonnets to fill the place of 
 " the clown." 
 
 Having thus obtained something like proof positive, 
 
 5 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S STORY OF HIS LIFE 
 
 I looked more closely into the Sonnets for details of the 
 scandal, and saw that, from the looth to the end of 
 the series, they contained the successive stages of a 
 strange attempt by the poet to persuade Lord Pembroke 
 to father an impending infant which was not his. The 
 alleged real father, who kept aloof, is darkly indicated 
 in S. 1 24 as a certain courtier or statesman ; and in 
 the upshot it appears that Shakespeare himself was 
 impeached of the paternity, falsely as he alleges, and 
 upon suborned information, according to the last 
 couplet of the last sonnet addressed to Pembroke. 
 There the story ends, so far as the Sonnets are con- 
 cerned, the date in the time-scheme being the month 
 of May 1 60 1. They were published exactly eight 
 years after (copyright of 20th May 1609), having been 
 kept in the author's desk, in obedience to Horace's 
 rule for doubtful matter, in nonum annum. 
 
 There were two things in the Sonnets of great 
 moment to Shakespeare himself — the refusal of the 
 laureateship to him, and his impeachment in the filiation 
 case of Mistress Fitton. 
 
 After a time I was able to follow each of those 
 personal matters into certain of the plays. The alleged 
 false impeachment, with the hard fate of the lady herself, 
 was the easier of the two. It is to be found in two 
 of the plays written in the course of the next two 
 years — ' Hamlet ' and ' Measure for Measure.' As 
 any outline of this evidence would be so meagre as 
 only to excite prejudice, I must refer direct to the 
 three last chapters, giving here only one instance of 
 how the facts work out. Mariana, in ' Measure for 
 Measure,' is Mary Fitton, and the moated grange at 
 St. Luke's is an old Tudor house with a moat at 
 Arbury, in which Mistress Fitton resided, within half 
 a mile of her sister Lady Newdigate at the Hall, after 
 her disgrace and banishment from the Court. I was 
 so sure that the moated grange in the play (the scene 
 of which is laid at Vienna) was a real English house, 
 
 6 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 that I looked for a moated house in the topographies 
 of that part of Warwickshire ; and when I went to see 
 the house which seemed to be the likely one, I found 
 it to be the old grange-house of the monastery upon 
 whose ruins Arbury Hall was built, retaining its huge 
 tithe barn, and its moat complete on three sides, and 
 with an ancient square tower at one end, a survival of 
 the time when it was a preceptory of the Knights 
 Templars. It has the cross of the Templars cut in 
 the stone of one of its gables, and is called Temple 
 House to this day; it is this association with the 
 Temple which reappears in the "St. Luke's" of 
 Mariana's residence. 
 
 The story of how Shakespeare came to lose the 
 laureateship, and why his loss of it cut him so deeply, 
 was much more difficult to disentangle than his love- 
 affair and its sequel. In reading ' The Tempest,' I 
 have always assumed, as I think every one does, that 
 Prospero is Shakespeare himself. But what about 
 Prospero's enemies .? The ulterior design of the play 
 is to enable him to settle accounts with " all mine 
 enemies," who are wrecked upon his island and placed 
 in his power to that end. His enemies are five all told 
 — three princes with one drunken butler and one jester. 
 The five enemies are always kept carefully distinct in 
 two classes ; the three attendant lords, as well as the 
 young Prince Ferdinand, being excluded from the 
 category of " enemies." The question occurred to me 
 (I cannot find that it has ever occurred to any one 
 else) : If Prospero be Shakespeare, who are Prospero's 
 enemies ? It then appeared that the whole purpose of 
 the comedy was to survey the author's life as a player 
 and writer (in the reminiscences with Miranda and 
 Ariel), to take farewell of the stage, to hold a final 
 audit of his personal account, and to settle scores with 
 every one, forgiving some cordially and others coldly 
 and disdainfully. Just before the curtain falls, he 
 addresses the chief princely personage, Alonso, with 
 
 7 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S STORY OF HIS LIFE 
 
 whom he has been cordially reconciled, and promises 
 to spend the last evening on the island in relatmg " the 
 story of my life," 
 
 Alomo. I long 
 
 To hear the story of your life, which must 
 Take the ear strangely. 
 
 Prospero. I'll deliver all. 
 
 What would we not give to have heard the calm and 
 stately Prospero relating the story of his life in the 
 twilight of his cave on that last evening of his stay 
 upon the enchanted island ? 
 
 The story is in the play itself. We have only to 
 identify the personages and the allegory begins to 
 unravel. 
 
 The first that I identified was the man whom 
 Prospero always treats and speaks of with unusual 
 affection, the " honest old counsellor " Gonzalo. There 
 were not many English statesmen surviving in 1 6 1 1 to 
 whom those terms could be applied ; so that merely by 
 exclusion I guessed him to be Fulke Greville. On 
 scanning every line closely, as one should do in an 
 enigma, I saw that the strangely studied remark about 
 one of Gonzalo's pockets being stained with salt water 
 suited the fact that one of Greville's offices was that of 
 Treasurer of the Navy under both Elizabeth and James, 
 Antonio's object being, with his usual cynicism, to 
 insinuate peculation. Having thus penetrated amongst 
 a group of English statesmen and courtiers, I went on 
 confidently to identify the others. I forget in what 
 order I found them out, in the course of many readings 
 of the play and much collateral reading, but I will give 
 them in the order of importance. The greatest surprise 
 was Antonio, Prospero's arch-enemy and his unnatural 
 brother. Him I found to be Lord Southampton, 
 Shakespeare's original patron. The discovery came 
 out as follows : Antonio engages with Sebastian in a 
 conspiracy within the play, upon which nothing turns 
 
 8 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 for the actual plot, being purely academic, or for the 
 sake of characterising Antonio and Sebastian and 
 giving animation to one of the scenes. Antonio having 
 raised the question of the succession to the Crown, 
 Sebastian says of Ferdinand, the heir of Naples — 
 
 I have no hope 
 That he's undrown'd. 
 
 Antonio. O, out of that " no hope " 
 
 What great hope have you ! 
 
 Halliwell-Phillipps had seen this use of " no hope," 
 as a substantive phrase, in some MS. from which he 
 quoted, but would give no reference to. After a search 
 among likely sources in the Manuscript Room of the 
 British Museum, 1 found it in a MS. of eight folios in 
 Elizabethan handwriting, entitled " The Earle of Essex 
 his rebellione, with the speache of him and of the 
 Earle of South, upon the leads before they yealded 
 themselves," etc. ; and on the second page of it the 
 following report of a conversation between Sir Robert 
 Sidney, spokesman of the besieging party in the garden 
 of Essex House on the evening of Sunday the 8 th 
 February 1601, and Lord Southampton on the leads, 
 spokesman for the rebels within : — 
 
 Sydney. By standing out there is noe hope, but by yealdinge 
 there is some hope afforded you. 
 
 South. Well, cosen, that hope is soe little that without hostages 
 wee will rather make choice of this noe hope then of that hope. 
 
 This was enough at the outset to identify Antonio 
 with Lord Southampton, Sebastian with Essex, the 
 plot in the play with the historical conspiracy of those 
 two. The next discoveries were, that Antonio is 
 carefully made to appear the evil genius of Sebastian in 
 the conspiracy — Southampton the evil genius of Essex 
 in the political plot which cost the latter his head ; and 
 that Francisco, the lord in attendance upon Duke 
 Antonio, is Francis Bacon — " this lord of weak remem- 
 brance," Bacon immemor, forgetful of old benefits and on 
 
 9 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S STORY OF HIS LIFE 
 
 the outlook for new, who prosecuted for the Crown at 
 the State Trial, pressed the case againsf Essex, his bene- 
 factor, but did not press the case against Southampton, 
 to whom he hastened to pay court as soon as he was 
 released from the Tower on the accession of James. 
 The identification of Bacon with Francisco, which turns 
 upon two points compacted into five lines, has been 
 made by latter-day scepticism of greater interest than 
 Shakespeare could ever have imagined. Alonso the 
 King of Naples becomes Lord Pembroke almost 
 naturally ; it was with him that Prospero desired 
 above all to be reconciled ; Ferdinand is brought in 
 as his heir ; and Miranda, the beloved daughter of 
 Prospero, is to be married to the heir of Naples, and 
 the two royal houses united in a lasting alliance — 
 Shakespeare's folio of his works to be dedicated to 
 Lord Pembroke and his heir. 
 
 Other identifications will be found in the text. 
 But the real enigma of Shakespeare's literary life 
 remained : Why was Lord Southampton his enemy, 
 his unnatural brother, his supplanter, and the cause of 
 his allegorical exile.? It was a long time before I 
 found out that ; and I should not be able to recapitulate 
 all the steps if I tried. One of the first clues was the 
 identification of ParoUes in 'All's Well that Ends 
 Well,' with a poet now almost forgotten, Barnabe 
 Barnes, who was one of Lord Southampton's protigis ; 
 his identity is not at all difficult to prove, and can be 
 used to base upon with the utmost confidence. Next 
 I found that Count Bertram in the same comedy had a 
 curious likeness to Southampton in the affair of his 
 marriage with Mistress Vernon (Helena), while it was 
 obvious that Bertram was under the evil influence of 
 ParoUes. I was able to trace the hand of Barnes in the 
 well-known tragedy of Locrine, which bears upon 
 its title-page of 1595 that it was "set forth, overseen, 
 and corrected, by W. S." — that is to say, by Shakespeare. 
 This pointed to some kind of collaboration of the 
 
 10 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 latter with what I may call the Southampton House 
 coterie ; and that suggested the possibility of col- 
 laboration with Lord Southampton himself. There 
 was a group of plays, of the years 1594-97, in which 
 Shakespeare must have had help, as the sources were 
 not all accessible to him, namely, ' The Merchant of 
 Venice,' ' The Comedy of Errors,' and ' A Midsummer 
 Night's Dream ' ; there was another group in which 
 there are many traces of another hand and another 
 taste than his, namely, ' Romeo and Juliet,' ' Richard 
 II.,' and ' Henry V.' ; there is also an anonymous play 
 of the year 1595, 'Edward III.,' in which his hand can 
 be traced in certain scenes only. The hypothesis was 
 that Southampton had a hand in all these, and that 
 Barnes had also been employed in the historical plays 
 to draft the scenes from Holinshed's Chronicle, and 
 perhaps to write the routine parts. But the weakness 
 of the theory was, that Lord Southampton was not 
 known to have had the ambition as well as the 
 imaginative gifts to be a poet. Here I began to 
 investigate the anonymous poem called Willobie his 
 Avisa, first published in 1594, which was as strangely 
 popular in its day as it was peculiar in its subject and 
 style, having enjoyed, perhaps, more editions than any 
 poems of the time excepting Shakespeare's ' Venus 
 and Adonis ' and ' Lucrece.' It grew out of the ' Rape 
 of Lucrece,' and was indeed a kind of playful satire 
 upon the tragedy of the Roman matron, exhibiting the 
 indomitable and thoroughly successful resistance of an 
 Englishwoman named Avisa to manifold solicitations 
 of her chastity, first as a maid and then as a wife. 
 Not only is Shakespeare mentioned in the poetical 
 introduction by his name as the author of ' Lucrece,' 
 but also in a prose passage interpolated in the middle 
 of the poem he is spoken of at some length under his 
 initials, W. S., as the familiar friend of the author, 
 H. W., having been called in to advise as a man of 
 experience under the allegory of a physician treating a 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S STORY OF HIS LIFE 
 
 patient for an attack of the plague, " the contagion of 
 a fantastical fit," " the unruly rage of an unbridled 
 fancy." Between the first and the second editions of 
 Avisa one finds many hints that the heroine was a 
 real person, the barmaid of one innkeeper and the wife 
 of another ; localities also are indicated with much 
 particularity ; and, in fine, Avisa can be shown to have 
 been a celebrated fair maid of the inn and afterwards 
 hostess, whose baptismal name was Avis, and her 
 surname Bird or Yate, and that she lived first at 
 Merdon, near Winchester, and after her marriage at 
 Winchester or Basingstoke ; moreover, there is some 
 evidence that the Merdon people, who were Catholics, 
 had been in correspondence in that capacity with the 
 household of Lord Southampton's mother in Holborn, 
 London. The scene in Hampshire, the initials H. W. 
 (Henry Wriothesley), the familiar friendship with 
 W. S., the satire upon ' Lucrece,' the slightly ironical 
 tone, the originality of the theme and the inexperience 
 of the pen — all these things together made it morally 
 certain to me that the author of Willobie his Avisa 
 was Lord Southampton, and that he had been induced 
 to try his hand at verse composition through his 
 friendship with Shakespeare. Thus the antecedent 
 objection was removed from the hypothesis of their 
 collaboration in the writing of plays during the next 
 four years : the patron had not only literary ambition, 
 but also a certain poetic facility. 
 
 The parable of the unnatural brother Antonio in 
 ' The Tempest ' now began to be intelligible, with the 
 help of the corresponding allegory in ' As You Like 
 It ' of the wrestler Orlando and his unnatural brother 
 Oliver, who became jealous because he saw himself 
 " misprised." During a long absence of Lord South- 
 ampton abroad in 1598, Shakespeare began to assert 
 himself upon the title-pages of plays which had been 
 anonymous before. In the same autumn he gave 
 himself out boldly through the Palladis Tamia of 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Meres as the author of no fewer than six comedies 
 and six tragedies or histories. This was the situation 
 which Southampton would have found on his return in 
 November. Whether he had any just grievance is 
 not the question ; at all events, he saw himself " mis- 
 prised " by the independent action of the man with 
 whom he thought he had been collaborating. Just at 
 this time, January 1599, Spenser died, and the poet- 
 laureateship was vacant. It is clear from two of the 
 sonnets, 67 and 68, which immediately follow the 
 three upon Spenser's death, that Lord Herbert was 
 then associating with some one who wore false locks 
 (Southampton), and that Shakespeare warned him 
 against " infection " from his associate. At this date 
 there could hardly have been the old intimacy 
 between Shakespeare and his patron, who had drifted 
 away from literary ambitions ; he had been making 
 himself the talk and the jest of all Paris by his 
 reckless gambling at tennis, and had incurred the 
 lasting displeasure of Queen Elizabeth by his treatment 
 of her maid-of-honour, Mistress Vernon, whom he 
 came over to "justify" in August and left again 
 immediately after the secret marriage. In the end of 
 March 1599 he left London for the Irish campaign, 
 and was absent until October. Meanwhile the poet- 
 laureateship was refused to Shakespeare, having been 
 ostensibly promised to Samuel Daniel, Lord Herbert's 
 old tutor. From Sonnet 94 it becomes clear that 
 Shakespeare had discovered at length (autumn of 
 1599) who had been plotting against him in the 
 matter of the laureateship, namely, the same source of 
 "infection" to Herbert as in January — Southampton 
 himself. 
 
 Much more was involved in the loss of the poet- 
 laureateship than the titular honour and the pension. 
 There were charges of plagiarism in great things and in 
 little, Ben Jonson -having compared his works to a " frip- 
 pery" or old-clothes shop of wit, in his epigram of the 
 
 13 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S STORY OF HIS LIFE 
 
 year 1601, entitled " Poet Ape." Lord Southampton's 
 ground of umbrage was thus only a part of a more 
 general complaint ; so that this charge of conveying 
 the plots and ideas of others, and of giving out as 
 his work what was not all his, appears to have been the 
 real reason, characteristically English, why the most 
 original genius in our literature was deprived of the 
 Laurel Crown. There are many small indications 
 not only in his writings, but also some from external 
 sources, that he felt both his exclusion and the grounds 
 of his exclusion acutely ; it is this that Prospero has in 
 his memory when he forgives his enemies : 
 
 Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick. 
 Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst ray fury 
 Do I take part. 
 
 In one of the greatest, perhaps the most elaborate, of 
 his comedies, ' Troilus and Cressida,' we see him in an 
 intermediate period, 1602-03, ^^ Achilles in his tent, 
 the Greeks being the poets of the day and the Trojans 
 the nobles or men of affairs. The identities of most 
 of the characters are discoverable by numerous subtle 
 touches, and by some quite broad hints. Achilles lolls 
 on his bed, responding with deep-chested laughter to 
 the mimicking of the other Greek chiefs by Patroclus 
 (John Fletcher). This comedy was claimed in the 
 original preface as the wittiest work of its author ; and 
 so indeed it ought to be accounted when it is read with 
 a key. The spleen and wounded vanity of Achilles are 
 nothing less than amazing as deliberate introspection 
 and self- analysis. He is intimate and cordial with 
 Chapman (Ulysses), respectful and polite to Daniel 
 (Agamemnon), affectionate to old Churchyard (Nestor), 
 and merciless only to Ben Jonson (Ajax) and Marston 
 (Thersites), who are the same couple as Stephano the 
 drunken butler and Trinculo the jester in 'The 
 Tempest.' 
 
 14 
 
BOOK I 
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S STORY IN THE SONNETS 
 
 IS 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE KEY TO THE SONNETS 
 
 Shakespeare prepared his Sonnets for the press and 
 had them published in 1609, probably among the last 
 things he did before he left London. It may be 
 assumed that he had some hesitation about printing 
 them at all, for it was not until he had fulfilled Horace's 
 conditions for doubtful literary matter, namely, to keep 
 it in your desk in nonum annum., until the ninth year, 
 that he sent them to the press, the copyright having 
 been taken out on 20th May 1609, just into the ninth 
 year from the date of the events in the last sonnets. 
 If he had any belief in their promise of an eternity of 
 fame to himself (S. 107) and to the principal person 
 addressed in them (S. 81), he must have looked on 
 the book as testamentary. But he must have known 
 that he was throwing an enigma to the world, to make 
 what it could of ; and therefore he went as far as he 
 thought fit in supplying a key, the printed text giving 
 here and there (as the sequel will show) such clues as 
 typography can give to the identity of persons. He 
 might indeed have been more explicit, for example, by 
 writing headings to the several sonnets, as some of his 
 contemporaries did ; but he was naturally chary of 
 revealing more than circumstances warranted at the 
 time. At the end of the volume he printed a remark- 
 able poem, 'A Lover's Complaint,' which, if also 
 enigmatic, seems to be meant somehow to help out 
 the story of the Sonnets ("their distract parcels in 
 
 17 c 
 
KEY TO THE SONNETS 
 
 combined sums ") ; and in it he has left a valuable hint 
 of what his method was in the enigma — he gives us his 
 view of the capabilities and uses of the sonnet as a 
 lyrical form. It is the more necessary to recall this 
 hint, inasmuch as Wordsworth has missed it in his 
 categories of sonnet-writers (" Scorn not the sonnet," 
 etc.). His first example is, " With this key Shakespeare 
 unlocked his heart " ; but some have doubted the fact, 
 Browning among them. It would have been more 
 correct to have added, "and with the same key he 
 locked up his meaning." His own view of the sonnet 
 is hardly expressed by any of Wordsworth's examples ; 
 it is called " deep -brained," and is likened to the 
 diamond, the emerald, the sapphire, or the opal — 
 
 Each several stone, 
 With wit well blazon'd, smiled or made some moan. 
 
 There are only a few of the whole one hundred and 
 fifty-four sonnets so vehement and impassioned as to 
 have no place for wit ; in some even of the gravest 
 kind, and in all the rest, there is wit everywhere. 
 One is apt to think that Milton's characteristics of 
 " L' Allegro " and of " II Penseroso," if they were ever 
 being mixed, would best express the spirit and method of 
 the Sonnets — the " quips and cranks and wanton wiles " 
 of the cheerful man, with the " sage and solemn tunes " 
 of the pensive man, " where more is meant than meets 
 the ear." It is noteworthy that Milton uses in "II 
 Penseroso " a striking figure, " forget thyself to marble," 
 which he had used before in his Epitaph on Shakespeare : 
 surely he was thinking of the Sonnets of 1 609 quite as 
 much as of the Folio of 1623 : 
 
 For whilst to th' shame of slow-endeavoring art 
 Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart 
 Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book 
 Those Delphic lines with deep impression took, 
 Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving, 
 Dost make us marble with too much conceiving. 
 18 
 
THEIR DEDICATION 
 
 It is a long way from that to certain modern views, 
 which see in the Sonnets either " frigid conceits " or 
 such veiled personal meanings as the author never 
 meant to be given to the world. 
 
 The most damnable of aU the recent heresies is, that 
 the Sonnets were abstracted from the author's desk, and 
 published without his leave by a low bookseller, who 
 at the same time annexed the ' Lover's Complaint,' — 
 " with characteristic insolence," as one authority says. 
 The single ground of this queer hypothesis is, that the 
 dedication of the volume is made by the publisher and 
 not by the author — as if the author had not an obvious 
 and imperative reason for putting forward the convenient 
 publisher to dedicate the book to its " only begetter " 
 (the phrase covering a sly joke, see p. 68), wishing him 
 all happiness now that years had passed and bygones 
 were bygones, the reason, namely, that, on the book's 
 own showing, they had met last in a deadly quarrel, and 
 had parted with the envoi of S. 125 flung at his false 
 friend's head by the angry playwright : 
 
 Hence, thou suborn'd Informer! a true soul, 
 When most impeach'd stands least in thy control. 
 
 How can any one maintain that the quarto of 1609 
 had not been prepared for the press by the author 
 himself.? The longer sequence of one hundred and 
 twenty-six sonnets is, at all events, a natural order, 
 which hardly admits of rearrangement, and must have 
 been designed. Mr. Wyndham finds evidence also of 
 the author's care for his copy, as one piece, if not for 
 the proof-sheets of the book, in the high degree ot 
 uniformity with which italics (with capitals) are used 
 for certain words to the number of thirty-six, as well as 
 in the methodical use of capitals for a much larger 
 group of common nouns (some two hundred) which he 
 classifies under five heads. It is, of course, arguable 
 that the copy had been found by the supposed thief in 
 a condition all ready for the press ; and it may be 
 
 19 
 
KEY TO THE SONNETS 
 
 urged that the printed text shows so many errors and 
 so much careless pointing that the author could hardly 
 have taken pains to correct the proofs, and possibly 
 may not have seen them. But the state of the text, 
 which, as Boaden said, is " neither careless nor inelegant," 
 is not that of a book printed without the author's 
 knowledge. Any one who is curious to see the differ- 
 ence between a posthumous edition and an author's 
 edition of a work of that age may compare the 4th 
 edition of Davison's Poetical Rapsodie, 1621, with one 
 of the three editions printed in his lifetime. Supposing 
 the copy to have been stolen, and printed without his 
 knowledge, he could have stopped it, as he probably 
 stopped some of the sonnets which were circulating 
 among his friends long before : a book made up of 
 Amores by J. D. (Sir John Davies) "with certeine 
 othyr sonnetes by W. S." was entered on the Stationers' 
 Register, 3rd January 1600, by Eleazer Edgar, but is 
 not heard of again. 
 
 The words printed in italics with initial capitals 
 will strike every one who uses the original text. There 
 is one in the second line of the opening sonnet — namely. 
 Rose: it is the keynote. There is another. Hews, in 
 S. 20, which is obviously a play between a proper name 
 and the common noun "hew," or "hue." In Sonnets 
 135 and 136 there are ten printings oi Will, to pun 
 with the word for volition or desire (" for my name is 
 Will"), and one more in S. 143. Besides these thirteen, 
 there are twenty-three more, which Mr. Wyndham 
 accounts for severally (all but the Informer oi S. 125) 
 as "either a proper name or else of Greek or Latin 
 extraction." But that is hardly the correct principle. 
 All the names from classical mythology, along with 
 Eve from Biblical, are printed uniformly in italics, to 
 the number of eleven, and with these the adjective 
 Grecian is included by a slip. The vigilance with 
 which these scattered names had been underlined is in 
 marked contrast to the carelessness of Thomas Watson's 
 
 20 
 
THE WORDS IN ITALICS 
 
 Tears of Fancy, a posthumous volume of sonnets (1593), 
 in which nineteen of the names from Ovid are in italics 
 and fourteen of them in roman (in a copy which wants 
 Sonnets 9-16). 
 
 Next we come to a group of words, not only of 
 Latin or Greek "extraction," as Mr. Wyndham says 
 (which would be a wide class), but pure Latin or Greek 
 or Arabic — Ciuieius, Interim, Audit (twice), Statue 
 (elsewhere statua), Abism, and Alcumie — every instance 
 of the kind is in italics except one " audit " and one 
 " alcumie." In the ' Lover's Complaint ' the close 
 observance of the rule is almost startling. There is 
 only one word In italics in the whole forty-seven stanzas 
 — namely, Alloes, bitter aloes, in stanza 39, being a 
 pure Greek word of three syllables like statua in Latin ; 
 and that is the only word in all the poem (excepting 
 one "audit") that calls for italics, according to the 
 typographical rules deduced from the Sonnets. 
 
 There remain only four of the italicised words to 
 deal with, besides R.ose^ Hews, and the eleven Wills — 
 namely. Informer, Autumne, Heriticke, and Alien in the 
 " alien pen " of the rival poet of S. 78. It may be said 
 that " alien " is Law Latin like " audit," and should be 
 in the same group ; but it was much too old a synonym 
 for " stranger " to be still treated as a pure Latin word, 
 having been in Wyclif's Bible both as an adjective and 
 a substantive ; besides, there is no propriety in using it 
 in " alien pen " for its literal meaning : it is italicised 
 just because it is used for some other purpose. So also 
 the italics in "thou suborn'd Informer" are a special 
 underlining, the sting of which would have been felt by 
 the person to whom the sonnet was written. Autumne 
 in S. 1 04, in the context of six other seasons or months 
 not in italics, is thus emphasised because it is " childing 
 Autumn," or the season of fruitfulness. Heriticke 
 occurs in the remarkable phrase of S. 124, " policy, that 
 Heretic " (compare ' Twelfth Night,' III. ii. 33), which 
 has a sufficient meaning in the original Greek sense of 
 
KEY TO THE SONNETS 
 
 " policy, that free-to-choose " ; but it is underlined also 
 to point to an individual who was a heretic, as Ben 
 Jonson defines the term : Puritanus Hypocritica est 
 Haereticus ; therefore the italics, to distinguish its use 
 here from its ordinary ecclesiastical use elsewhere (eight 
 times in the Plays). After these, we are left with Rose, 
 Hews, Men, and the Wills ; and these contain the key 
 or keys to the enigma of the real personages and events 
 of the Sonnets. 
 
 Tyrwhitt's explanation of the line in S. 20 — 
 
 A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted. . . . 
 A man in hew, all Hezos in his controlling 
 
 — was that Hews (Hughes) was some one's surname ; 
 but he had not attempted to construe " Controlling all 
 Hews (or Hughes) in his own hew " — i.e. in his own 
 mien or aspect. Hews is not a surname singular, with 
 a possessive ending, but the plural of a proper name, as 
 the "all Hews" requires it to be. It is a play upon 
 one of the baronies or courtesy titles of the Earl of 
 Pembroke, Fitzhugh, or Fitzhew ; so that the line 
 construes : " A man in hew, [my lord Fitzhew], the 
 lord of all the sons of Hew." In like manner, in the 
 opening couplet of S. i — 
 
 From fairest creatures we desire increase, 
 That thereby beauty's Rose might never die 
 
 — Rose is my lord Rose, my lord Ros of Kendal, 
 another of the Pembroke baronies. The only real 
 barony of the earldom of Pembroke at that time was 
 Herbert of Cardiff, which was young Herbert's proper 
 courtesy title ; but his father, the second earl, who was 
 much engrossed with genealogy and heraldry, had 
 annexed, on the death without issue of his maternal 
 uncle Lord Parr in 1571, a whole garland of ancient or 
 semi-legendary baronies, two of which — Marmion and 
 St. Quentin — were, according to Dugdale, never alive 
 at all as baronies of the realm, while the other three or 
 
MY LORD ROSE 
 
 four were probably defunct — namely, the primary 
 barony of Parr and its pendants Fitzhew, Ros of 
 Kendal, and Hart (in Northamptonshire), the last 
 having been a new creation by patent of Henry VIII. 
 to the last Lord Parr. All of these, excepting Hart, 
 continued to be given as Pembroke baronies as late as 
 the 1 8 1 2 edition of Collins's Peerage, and it is clear that 
 they were in actual use in Shakespeare's time, from a 
 sonnet of Francis Davison (1602) addressed to William, 
 Earl of Pembroke, Lord Herbert of Cardiff, Marmion, 
 and St. Quintin. 
 
 Shakespeare's favourite among these courtesy titles 
 appears to have been my lord Ros, which made a good 
 pet name as my lord Rose. The imagery of the Rose 
 (always with a capital), including its colours, perfumes, 
 distilled essence, thorns, and canker, recurs in sonnet 
 after sonnet, and may run through all the fourteen lines, 
 as in S. 54 and S. 95. In the latter there is a line 
 which is conclusive proof that he knew W. H. by the 
 name of Rose : 
 
 How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame, 
 Which, like a canker in the fragrant Rose, 
 Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name ! 
 Oh in what sweets dost thou thy sins inclose ! 
 That tongue that tells the story of thy days, 
 (Making lascivious comments on thy sport) \ 
 Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise : 
 Naming thy name blesses an ill report. 
 Oh what a mansion have those vices got, ' 
 Which for their habitation chose out thee, 
 Where beauty's veil doth cover every blot. 
 And all things turns to fair that eyes can see ! 
 
 What other name than Rose can be said, in the naming 
 of it, to bless an ill report ? As Bishop Hall says : 
 " Anything passes well under the rose." The sonnet 
 might have been headed either Sub Rosa or Couleur de 
 Rose. Again, as late as S. 109, we find Rose in the 
 last couplet, although nothing in the sonnet leads up to 
 it as a figure of speech : 
 
 23 
 
KEY TO THE SONNETS 
 
 For nothing this wide universe I call, 
 Save thou, my Rose ; in it thou art my 
 
 all. 
 
 It is the old pet name escaping from him, the same 
 
 name as in S. 89 : 
 
 and in my tongue 
 Thy sweet beloved name no more shall dwell. 
 
 That the sweet name was Rose is the more probable 
 from the parallel case of Rosaline in ' Love's Labour's 
 Lost': 
 
 When tongues speak sweetly, then they name her name. 
 And Rosaline they call her. 
 
 The other Pembroke baronies were not so well suited 
 to allegorial or paronomastic uses ; the single attempt 
 with Fitzhew, "all Hews in his controlling," is 
 ingenious but not neat. It is not easy to pun upon 
 Parr, while Marmion and St. Quentin are best left 
 alone. But one can imagine Hart (Heart) being 
 treated like Ros ; and it is not impossible that occasional 
 puns upon it are intended, although the pair of antithetic 
 sonnets, 46 and 47, upon the heart and the eye, are 
 best explained as a parody of Watson's jingling pair, 
 19 and 20 of the Tears of Fancy. It is probable that 
 the garland of semi-legendary or defunct Pembroke 
 , baronies, and the numerous ancestry involved in them, 
 are wittily pointed at in the mysterious Sonnet 31, 
 which would be headed, " Dead Baronies alive again " 
 (" love " being used, as in some other places, in the 
 figurative sense of" generation " ) : 
 
 Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts 
 Which I by lacking have supposed dead ; 
 And there reigns Love and all Love's loving parts, 
 And all those friends which I thought buried. 
 How many a holy and obsequious tear 
 Hath dear religious love stol'n from mine eyes 
 As interest of the dead, which now appear 
 But things remov'd that hidden in thee lie. 
 24 
 
PEMBROKE HERALDRY 
 
 Thou art the grave where buried love doth live, 
 Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone, 
 Who all their parts of me to thee did give. 
 That due of many now is thine alone. 
 Their images I lov'd I view in thee 
 And thou (all they) hast all the all of me. 
 
 Besides the genealogy, the heraldry of the Pem- 
 broke family comes also into two sonnets. The 
 mock-sublime imagery of the apostrophe to Time 
 in S. 19, a lion with retracted claws, a tiger with 
 toothless " yaws," and a phoenix, are very nearly the 
 supporters and crest of the Pembroke arms, the 
 panther supporter being changed into a tiger, and the 
 wyvern of the crest into the more familiar and equally 
 fabulous phoenix : 
 
 Devouring Time, blunt thou the Lion's paws, 
 And make the Earth devour her own sweet brood. 
 Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce Tiger's yaws. 
 And burn the long-lived Phoenix in her blood. 
 
 To explain the second line one must go to heraldry. 
 The lion the brood of the earth is the heraldic lion 
 issuanl, as Milton also conceives him in his primal 
 creation, Paradise Lost, vii. 463 ; the sweet brood of 
 the earth being devoured by its mother would be the 
 lion in the opposite heraldic situation, whatever it may 
 be called in heraldry. 
 
 The second instance is S. 105, which might be headed 
 with the Pembroke motto — Ungje servirai : 
 
 Let not my love be called Idolatry, 
 Nor my beloved as an Idol show. 
 Since all alike my songs and praises be 
 To one, of one, still such, and ever so. 
 Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind. 
 Still constant in a wondrous excellence ; 
 Therefore my verse to constancy confin'd. 
 One thing expressing, leaves out difference. 
 
 The " Idolatry " and " Idol " of the opening lines point 
 clearly to a portrait (as in ' Two Gentlemen of Verona,' 
 
 25 
 
KEY TO THE SONNETS 
 
 IV". ii. 129) which would have had the family motto 
 painted on it. One of the engraved portraits of 
 Lord Pembroke has Ung je serviray in large letters 
 round the border. In the second half of the sonnet, 
 the play of ideas is upon the Parr motto, Amour avec 
 loyauti : 
 
 Fair, kind, and true is all my argument, 
 — Fair, kind, and true varying to other words — 
 And in this change is my invention spent : 
 Three themes in one which wondrous scope affords. 
 Fair, kind, and true have often lived alone. 
 Which three till now never kept seat in one. 
 
 The date of this corresponds with Lord Herbert's 
 accession to the Earldom of Pembroke. 
 
 The identity of the person addressed, in the first 
 series of sonnets, with Lord Pembroke being thus 
 determined beyond reasonable doubt, according to the 
 original guess of Mr. Heywood Bright of Lincoln's 
 Inn (18 1 8), on grounds which his fastidiousness in 
 completing his proof kept him from ever publishing, 
 and according to the evidence of Mr. Boaden in 1832, 
 which Hallam and many others have held to be 
 sufficient for practical assent although it was not a 
 " strict " proof, it becomes easy to fix the dates of 
 the several events which inspired certain groups of the 
 Sonnets. The opening series — 1-17 — addressed to a 
 youth unwilling to marry, are explained by the un- 
 successful project of marriage, in 1597, between Lord 
 Herbert, aged seventeen, and Bridget Vere, daughter 
 of the Earl of Oxford. In the spring of 1598 young 
 Herbert commenced residence in London, and appeared 
 at Court — 
 
 His years but young, but his experience old ; 
 His head unmellow'd, but his judgement ripe 
 
 — like Proteus arriving at the Court of Milan in 
 ' The Two Gentlemen of Verona.' An intimacy with 
 Shakespeare appears to have been struck up at once, 
 
 26 
 
DATES FIXED 
 
 the traces of which are in the latter half of the series 
 of affectionate and admiring Sonnets 1-32. If it should 
 seem, as it seemed to Hallam, that these and other 
 sonnets betray an " excessive and misplaced affection," 
 it should be kept in mind as explaining the writer's 
 obviously sincere compliments to the young noble, 
 " the world's fresh ornament," that Clarendon, in his 
 faithful portrait of Lord Pembroke, declares him to 
 have been " the most universally loved and esteemed 
 of any man of that age." Before long (" he was but 
 one hour mine ") an unpleasantness arose between them 
 about the lady who was the poet's mistress. This 
 comes into eight sonnets as a very serious matter ; but 
 after S. 42 it is dropped, and does not appear again 
 until S. 93, but for passing references to jealousy in 
 Sonnets 57, 58, and 61, and to slander or suspicion, like 
 a crow in the clear sky, In S. 70. The sonnets from 43 
 to 63 correspond with an uneventful period, during 
 part of which the writer seems to have been on tour 
 as an actor. S. 60 is on Christmas and the New Year. 
 Next comes a striking sequence of three, 64-66, which 
 suit exactly the title of one of Spenser's poems, " The 
 Ruins of Time," and were doubtless inspired by that 
 poet's sad death in ruined circumstances at his lodging 
 in King Street, Westminster, on 8th January 1599. 
 The series of ten which follow, 67-76, are notable for 
 their despondent tone, and for one probable hint of 
 suicide in S. 74 (" the coward conquest of a wretch's 
 knife "). One cause of the despondency is, that Lord 
 Herbert has come within the influence of some " in- 
 fection," which I shall show afterwards (in Chapter IX.) 
 to have been that of Lord Southampton, lately re- 
 turned to London from his dissipations in Paris. If 
 Southampton had been still Shakespeare's patron, the 
 tone of these sonnets would be unaccountable ; but, 
 in fact, he had become his enemy, and was plotting 
 against him. Then comes the remarkable episode of 
 the Rival Poet in nine sonnets, 78-86, with the bitter 
 
 27 
 
KEY TO THE SONNETS 
 
 feelings which it left behind, in six more sonnets. 
 S. 77, the next before the rival-poet series begins, 
 gives us a clue to the date. It is written to accompany 
 the gift of a blank-book, or table-book, in which k was 
 probably inscribed. Malone pointed out that it was 
 the custom to make such gifts on New Year's Day; 
 but Steevens cited the case of Lord Orrery sending 
 Swift a pocket-book on his birthday, with just such 
 another sonnet written In it. The theme was the lapse 
 of time ; and as it is young Herbert's natal years (" thy 
 precious minutes ") rather than calendar years that are 
 meant, the occasion was probably his birthday. If we 
 take it to have been his nineteenth birthday, the date 
 of S. 77 would have been 8 th April 1599. The very 
 next sonnet opens the affair of the rival poet, which 
 with its bitter sequel may be supposed to carry us 
 towards the end of that year. There was then a break 
 in the correspondence. Summer, autumn, and the next 
 spring are named as the seasons of absence ; but it is 
 probable that the lines on Winter in S. 97 must be 
 taken literally and not allegorically : 
 
 How like a Winter hath my absence been 
 From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year ! 
 What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen. 
 What old December's bareness everywhere ! 
 
 He goes on as if the season had not really been winter, 
 but winter only in his feelings and thoughts : 
 
 And yet this time remov'd was summer's time, 
 
 The teeming Autumn, big with rich increase, 
 
 Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime, 
 
 Like widow'd wombs after their Lords' decease. 
 
 Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me 
 
 But hope of Orphans and unfathered fruit ; 
 
 For Summer and his pleasures wait on thee, 
 
 And thou away the very birds are mute. 
 Or if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer 
 That leaves look pale, dreading the Winter's near. 
 
 The meaning of all this exquisite allegory cannot be 
 
 28 
 
DATES FIXED 
 
 made clear just yet. But the conclusion from it 
 would be that Summer and Autumn, the pretended 
 seasons, are brought in for the sake of the ideas of 
 pleasure and fecundity, and that the sonnet was written 
 actually for winter, notwithstanding the words " And 
 yet this time removed was," etc. The need for making 
 the real date winter appears from the next sonnet, 98, 
 which is on Spring, and cannot have followed a Summer- 
 and-Autumn sonnet. Mr. Wyndham has found another 
 clue to the date of the Spring sonnet, 98 : 
 
 From you have I been absent in the spring, 
 When proud pied April, dressed in all his trim. 
 Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing : 
 That heavy Saturn laught and leapt with him. 
 
 He has ascertained that Saturn was in opposition on 
 4th April 1600, 17th April 1601, and 29th April 
 1602, rising as a bright planet about sunset in the 
 first year, and at a gradually later hour in the Aprils 
 of the two next years. Our choice is really limited to 
 the April of 1600 by two valuable clues to the dates 
 which are contained in the following group of sonnets, 
 100-126. The first of these is in S. 104, which counts 
 the seasons that had passed since their friendship 
 began : thrice had winter shaken the leaves from the 
 trees, thrice had autumn turned to yellow, thrice had 
 April perfumes burned hot in June. Starting from the 
 spring of 1598, we should now be in the middle of the 
 third winter, 1 600-1 601. The other clue confirms 
 this, the national event of S. 107: 
 
 Not mine own fears nor the prophetic soul 
 Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come, 
 Can yet the lease of my true love control. 
 Supposed as forfeit to a confin'd doom. 
 The mortal Moon hath her eclipse endur'd. 
 And the sad Augurs mock their own presage ; 
 Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd. 
 And peace proclaims Olives of endless age. 
 29 
 
KEY TO THE SONNETS 
 
 Now with the drops of this most balmy time 
 My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes ; 
 Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme. 
 While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes. 
 And thou in this shalt find thy monument. 
 When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent. 
 
 The Queen, under the figure of the mortal Moon, had 
 endured, or emerged from, an eclipse, and the sad 
 augurs were mocking their own presage. This was 
 the foiled attempt of the Earl of Essex, with a large 
 following of peers, knights, and esquires, to overthrow 
 the Queen's rule on the 8th February 1601. There 
 had been a notable eclipse the year before, on which 
 Woodhouse's Almanack for 1601 based a prognostica- 
 tion that its influence would be felt in the State from 
 20th January 1601 until November. When the re- 
 bellion of Essex took place, the populace were so 
 impressed by the closeness of Woodhouse's prophecy 
 that the Government thought it necessary to call in 
 the copies of the paltry book. There was no other 
 event in Elizabeth's reign which threatened her- in the 
 same way. In the Directions for Preachers, issued in 
 time for the Sunday after the attempt, it was stated : 
 "If he had not been prevented, there had never been 
 a rebellion in England since Richard II. more desperate 
 and dangerous. The rebellion in the North was far 
 off, and thereby not so perilous. The Great Armada 
 of Spain was but a thunderclap, the noise being greater 
 than the danger, and her Majesty's subjects faithfully 
 united to encounter it." Shakespeare's " own fears," 
 for his liberty "supposed as forfeit to a confined 
 doom," are explained by the fact that some of Essex's 
 friends went, on the Thursday or Friday before, to the 
 Globe Theatre, and there arranged with Augustine 
 Phillips, Shakespeare's fellow-actor and friend, to play 
 on the Saturday " the deposing and killing of Richard 
 II.," and promised to give the actors forty shillings 
 as an inducement to do so, the play being "so old 
 
 30 
 
A DEFINITE DATE, 8th FEBRUARY 1601 
 
 and so long out of use that they should have a small 
 company at it." Essex's friends went over the water 
 to see the play, after dining " at Gunter's " ; the gossip 
 of the day gives the impression that the play they had 
 seen was 'Henry IV.,' whereas it was undoubtedly 
 ' Richard II.' Phillips was examined before the law- 
 officers of the Crown. The actors of the Globe 
 probably had their fears, but none of them are included 
 in the lists of those arrested. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE LAUREL CROWN 
 
 In the drama of the Sonnets, as in most dramas, the 
 leading motive is a love-afFair, which appears as early 
 as S. 33, and leads to rapid developments and 
 passionate scenes in the last group of sonnets. But 
 the episode of the Rival Poet, which comes between, is 
 also an integral part of the drama, and really more 
 important than the other in its bearing upon Shake- 
 speare's fortunes. 
 
 The first thing is to identify the rival poet. Having 
 done so, we shall find that his identity throws a new 
 light upon the real issue involved. In the nine 
 sonnets upon the rival poet himself, 78-86, there are 
 five clues to his identity, only one of which has been 
 used already, by Boaden, to show that Samuel Daniel 
 was the poet meant. It will be shown that the rivalry 
 was really to gain Lord Herbert's interest with the 
 Queen in filling up the office of Poet Laureate with its 
 substantial pension, vacant on the death of Spenser. 
 
 The first clue to Daniel is in the italicised word of 
 '■'■Alien pen" in the third line of the 78th Sonnet, 
 which opens the subject rather abruptly : 
 
 So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse, 
 And found such fair assistance in my verse. 
 As every Alien pen hath got my use. 
 And under thee their poesy disperse. 
 
 The meaning of " under thee " is under the Rose, 
 
 32 
 
THE RIVAL POET 
 
 sub rosa, privately ; this may explain the fact that no 
 series of sonnets by Daniel to Lord Herbert are printed 
 in his works. " Alien " is not the adjective which would 
 have been applied to the rival's pen for its aptness ; it 
 would not have been an apt word unless the other poet 
 had been a foreigner, which is out of the question. 
 The word is chosen, and printed in italics with a 
 capital, for the sake of an anagram. It is an anagram 
 of Daniel all but the D, It is also an imperfect 
 anagram (nothing unusual then, see Manningham's 
 Diary, Camden Soc, 1868, p. 18) of Alleyn or Aleyn, 
 and it would have been a perfect anagram of the last 
 if " alien " were in the archaic spelling " alyen." 
 Thomas Alleyn, well known as a necromancer, is 
 stated by Anthony Wood to have cast Lord Herbert's 
 nativity, and is supposed to have enjoyed the patronage 
 and hospitality of the Pembroke family. It appears 
 from S. 86 that the other poet had astrological " com- 
 peers by night " ; and Boaden, following up a hint 
 originally given by Steevens, discovered him in 
 Daniel, who had been young Herbert's tutor at Wilton, 
 and must there have " come within the very lime-twigs 
 of the necromancer's spells." The sonnet is explicit 
 enough : 
 
 Was it his spirit, by spirits tauglit to write 
 Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead ? 
 No, neither he, nor his compeers by night, 
 Giving him aid, my verse astonished ; 
 He, nor that affable familiar ghost 
 Which nightly gulls him with intelligence. 
 
 Steevens thought that this meant Dr. John Dee. He 
 was the greatest necromancer of his time, and was 
 countenanced by many of the nobility as well as by 
 the Queen, who presented him, in 1596, to the warden- 
 ship of the college at Manchester (he had aspired to a 
 deanery). Although Boaden did not see that this 
 astrologer was not resident in London when the sonnet 
 was written (as he did not work out the dates at all), 
 
 33 D 
 
THE LAUREL CROWN 
 
 yet he was led to associate AUeyn with the " compeers 
 by night" because the latter had cast Herbert's 
 nativity ; so that Daniel, Dee, and AUeyn were all 
 pointed at. And that is the explanation of "-Alien 
 pen " — an anagram which Boaden did not suspect. It 
 is Daniel without D (Dee), but with Aleyn, who would 
 .stand for the "affable familiar ghost." There is 
 nothing in Daniel's writings which betrays a knowledge 
 of the black art ; nor has any profession of necromancy 
 been found in any other contemporary poet, the few 
 words at the end of Chapman's preface to his Shadow 
 of Night (1594), upon the strength of which he has 
 been identified as the Rival Poet, being merely a 
 metaphor from such technical terms in necromancy as 
 one might know without being an adept. How could 
 one expect it .'' The subject itself was under the rose, 
 and, even if it had not been so, Daniel was much too 
 circumspect to have proclaimed himself an adept. But 
 there was no reason why Shakespeare should not let the 
 black cat out of the bag — in the angry mood in which 
 he wrote S. 86. 
 
 Another clue to Daniel is in the line of S. 85: 
 
 And precious phrase by all the Muses filed. 
 
 Meres, whose Paladis Tamia of 1598 places Shake- 
 speare in eiFect above all the poets of the day by naming 
 him nine times and in every category of excellence 
 (while Daniel is only in four), uses the same figure : 
 " The Muses would speak with Shakespeare's fine filed 
 phrase if they would speak English." This compliment 
 must have been well known ; and Shakespeare gives it 
 a ludicrous turn in transferring it from himself to his 
 rival, by setting all the Muses to work at the filing of 
 his phrases, the hit at Daniel being pointed at the title 
 of his poem Musophilus (1599), which is punned 
 upon in " Muses filed," and has for its subject the arts 
 and sciences, or all the Muses. 
 
 34 
 
SAMUEL DANIEL 
 
 There is a third clue to Daniel in the lines of 
 
 S. 82 : 
 
 The dedicated words which writers use 
 Of their fair subject, blessing every book. 
 
 Daniel was singular in his use of dedications, varying 
 them in different presentation copies, and so occasioning 
 many of those "cancels" (also of his title-pages) 
 which are the delight of bibliophiles. Allowing for a 
 bold hyperbole, it might have been said that he blessed 
 every copy by dedication. The best instances are of 
 the folio edition of his works issued for presents in 
 1 601 (to the public in 1602), the copy of which given 
 by him to Sir Thomas Bodley's new library at Oxford 
 (probably after 1606) has a special printed blessing of 
 the book to the use of the library, while the Bridge- 
 water House copy, now in the British Museum, has the 
 dedication to Elizabeth. There may be other instances 
 known ; for Dr. Grosart, Daniel's editor, has generalised 
 the fact thus : " Examination of the successive issues 
 (private or semi-private and published) of his Poems 
 reveals that Samuel Daniel was wont to insert special 
 Dedications and Addresses in gift copies of his books " 
 {Works, i. 2). There appears to be another gibe of 
 the same kind in S. 85 : 
 
 While comments of your praise, richly compiled. 
 Reserve their Character with golden quill. 
 
 Daniel used gilding as a border to his title-pages, as in 
 some of the copies of the Panegyricke Congratula- 
 torie to James I. on his accession, and may have used 
 it more freely in his autograph dedications. 
 
 Fourthly, there is a reference to Spenser's lines on 
 Daniel as a sonneteer in his Colin Clout's come Home 
 againe (1595) : 
 
 Yet doth his trembling Muse but lowly fly. 
 As daring not too rashly mount on hight ; 
 And doth her trembling plumes as yet but try 
 In love's soft lays and looser thought's delight. 
 Then rouse thy feathers quickly, Daniell, etc. 
 
 35 
 
THE LAUREL CROWN 
 
 Shakespeare's reference to this is in the opening 
 Sonnet on the Rival Poet, in the lines immediately 
 after the " Alien pen " : 
 
 Thine eyes that taught the dumb on high to sing, 
 And heavy ignorance aloft to fly. 
 Have added feathers to the learned's wing, 
 And given grace a double Majesty. 
 
 This is a witty and pleasant hit at the well-known fine 
 stanzas upon Stonehenge in Daniel's Musophilus — 
 Stonehenge 
 
 That on the goodly plain near Wilton stands. 
 
 The " dumb on high " are the stones of the temple, 
 which Daniel calls a " dumb heap." He makes them 
 " sing " in his verses ; and, while he remarks upon the 
 helplessness of Ignorance (with a capital I) to explain 
 them, he recites the legend that they were transported 
 in the air from Africa to Ireland, and thence to 
 Salisbury Plain. Lord Herbert, in teaching Daniel to 
 sing of this theme of local interest, had " added " 
 feathers to the learned's wing — the plumes and feathers 
 of Spenser's original compliment. 
 
 The last clue to Daniel is in the repeated use of the 
 ship-allegory, in two sonnets, 80 and 86. The contrast 
 in S. 80 between the rival poet's ship " of tall building 
 and of goodly pride " sailing over the soundless deep, 
 and his own saucy bark of light draught among the 
 shallows, is very nearly the same figure in which Ben 
 Jonson is contrasted with Shakespeare in Fuller's 
 Worthies. But whereas the contrast there is between 
 the two as poets and wits differently gifted, in the 
 Sonnets it is rather between the skill and luck of two 
 men embarked upon the sea of patronage ; and in that 
 respect it is easy to see why Daniel should have been 
 figured as a tall and goodly ship, or as a ship in proud 
 full sail. He had inserted into the text of his Civil 
 Wars (1595), near the beginning, a passage about 
 
 36 
 
OCCASION OF THE RIVALRY 
 
 himself which could not have escaped notice : it is in 
 the dedication to Lord Mountjoy : 
 
 And thou, Charles Mountjoy, born the world's delight. 
 That hast receiv'd into thy quiet shore 
 Me tempest-driven, fortune-tossed wight, 
 Tir'd with expecting and could hope no more. 
 
 If Shakespeare meant anything by using the ship- 
 allegory of his rival twice, the train of his ideas would 
 have been that Daniel had thriven at the hands of 
 patrons since the date of these pathetic lines to Lord 
 Mountjoy, that he had made progress in the art of 
 social navigation, and was able to take the sea with 
 greater assurance, bearing down upon "the prize" with 
 " the proud full sail " of experience and success : 
 
 Was it the proud full sail of his great verse. 
 Bound for the prize of all too precious you ? . . . 
 
 On the other hand, his own modest boat was likely to 
 prove " worthless " and to be " cast away " : 
 
 My saucy bark inferior far to his. . . . 
 Or being wreck'd I am a worthless boat, 
 He of tall building and of goodly pride. 
 
 These phrases from the allegory of ships show 
 clearly enough that the rivalry was no mere jealousy 
 for jealousy's sake, and no mere contest of wits to try 
 who could gratify my lord most ; but that it was a 
 contest for a real prize and for Lord Herbert's interest 
 in the same. The envoi of the last sonnet of the 
 series, which has puzzled the commentators and has 
 led to various readings, gives the most pregnant hint 
 of all. He mentions the things that were not the 
 cause of his silence and discomfiture, and concludes : 
 
 I was not sick of any fear from thence ; 
 But when your countenance fill'd up his line. 
 Then lack'd I matter, that enfeebled mine. 
 
 Daniel's "line " was his certificate (as in marriage lines, 
 or in the singular in ' Measure for Measure,' I. v. 56), 
 
 37 
 
THE LAUREL CROWN 
 
 which Herbert had filled up; "certificate" being 
 the term commonly given in the State Papers to an 
 application for an office. The office was that of Poet 
 Laureate, to which a pension of fifty pounds a year 
 was attached, equal to three or four hundred of our 
 money. 
 
 There is a note among Anthony Wood's collections 
 for his History of the University of Oxford, that he 
 had been told by one Ed. Joyner that " Spenser was 
 Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth : when he died 
 Samuel Daniel succeeded him, and him Ben Jonson." 
 It may seem remarkable that we should have to depend 
 on such casual evidence for so important a fact of the 
 time of Elizabeth, seeing how well authenticated are 
 the laureateships of Tate, Rowe, Eusden, Pye, and 
 others. However, the ever-diligent Malone has proved 
 that Spenser was indeed Poet Laureate, with a pension 
 of fifty pounds a year, from 1591 to his death in 1599- 
 He cited, in his Life of Dry den (1800), the patent for 
 Spenser's pension, which had been found in the Rolls 
 House shortly before (Pat. 33 Eliz., p. 3) ; and he 
 showed that the omission of the title of Poet Laureate 
 from the document meant nothing, inasmuch as it was 
 omitted equally from the patents of Ben Jonson and 
 Davenant. The story was, that Lord Treasurer Cecil 
 had objected to giving a pension for skill in rhyme, 
 and that Spenser's pension, which the Queen pressed 
 upon her minister, was therefore given for other good 
 and sufficient considerations, Cecil might have over- 
 come his scruples by the precedent of Bernard Andre, 
 who is actually called the King's Poet Laureate, but is 
 given his pension by mandate of 2 Hen. VII. " in 
 consideration of the increase of virtue and learning 
 accruing to many persons at Oxford and elsewhere 
 from his teaching." It was not until Ben Jonson's 
 second patent, from Charles I., 23rd April 1630, 
 which also raised the salary, that the " services of his 
 wit and pen " were mentioned, besides the conventional 
 
 38 
 
APPOINTMENT BY LETTERS PATENT 
 
 "good and acceptable services heretofore done and 
 hereafter to be done." It was not until Dryden's 
 patent, 1670, that the title was formally named with 
 the pension. Lastly, it was then unusual for the Poet 
 Laureate to style himself so on his title-pages. Dave- 
 nant's publisher used the fact as an advertisement in a 
 note to the posthumous folio of his works ; but he 
 himself either used the style of " His Majesty's 
 Servant " or nothing at all, and Dryden did the same 
 after him. Southey appears to have been the first 
 eminent wearer of the laurel to sport the title ; by 
 Wordsworth's time all shyness has disappeared, for in 
 his title-pages of 1847 he is "William Wordsworth, 
 D.C.L., Poet Laureate, etc., etc." 
 
 Although Malone left no doubt that Spenser was 
 made Poet Laureate, he would not admit that Daniel 
 succeeded him, maintaining that the office was vacant 
 from Spenser's death on 8th January 1599 until Ben 
 Jonson's appointment on ist January 1616. So far as 
 concerns appointment by Letters Patent, I am satisfied 
 that Malone was right. I have gone over the ground 
 again, and find as follows : The two volumes of Patent 
 Books (Pells) in the Record Office, for the period 
 concerned, do not contain the enrolment of a pension to 
 Samuel Daniel ; there is one to John Daniel (probably 
 Samuel's brother) of forty pounds for political services, 
 on igth August 1595. Also that is the only pension 
 under the name of Daniel in Dr. Julius Caesar's MS. 
 list, drawn up for King James, of pensions granted by 
 Elizabeth and still payable. But if Samuel Daniel did 
 not get the poet's pension by Letters Patent, there is 
 much evidence to bear out Anthony Wood's statement 
 that he succeeded in a manner to the office of Poet 
 Laureate on Spenser's death, his honorarium coming 
 indirectly from some benefice in the Queen's gift. 
 
 It is, however, more important to show that there 
 was a competition among the poets for the vacant 
 place. This is proved by a poem of Francis Davison, 
 
 39 
 
THE LAUREL CROWN 
 
 in his Poetical Rapsodie of 1602, a miscellany of 
 verses by himself and others written at various times. 
 He addresses a copy of verses to "Samuel Daniel, 
 Prince of English Poets," which is so like in method 
 to the prose enumeration by Meres of Shakespeare's 
 various excellencies in 1598 that Davison may be 
 supposed to be giving Daniel a metrical testimonial 
 for the vacant office, with his rival's praises in view. 
 He shows that Daniel had produced three kinds of 
 verse — lyrical in his Sonnets to Delia, tragical in his 
 Rosamond and Cleopatra, and heroical in his Civil 
 Wars. Some excelled in one kind, some in another, 
 some in a third — 
 
 But thou alone art matchless in them all. 
 
 Next he compares him to Alexander coming after 
 Philip : as the former grieved lest his predecessor had 
 left him no conquests to make, so Daniel was afraid 
 that Spenser had appropriated all the laurel — 
 
 Lest laurel were not left enough to frame 
 A nest sufficient for thine endless name. 
 
 But as that pearl of Greece soon after pass'd 
 In wondrous conquests his renowned sire. 
 And others all whose names by Fame are plac'd 
 In highest seats : so hath thy Muse surpass'd 
 Spenser, and all that do with hot desire 
 To the thunder-scorning laurel crown aspire. 
 
 Davison adds at the end of his testimonial the familiar 
 tag, Non equidem invideo, miror magis — as much as to 
 say, " I am not in for it myself." 
 
 The competition among the poets for the laurel 
 crown and pension may be supposed to have lasted 
 through the summer of 1599. The eligible candidates, 
 besides Daniel and Shakespeare, would have been 
 Drayton, Chapman, and Ben Jonson.i It appears 
 
 ' Court favour might have included others, such as Sir John Davies, the 
 author oi Nosce Teipsum (1599), dedicated to the Queen (at the instance of 
 Lord Mountjoy), who is said to have relished it so well " that she encouraged 
 
 40 
 
DANIEL THE QUASI-LAUREATE 
 
 from the 87 th Sonnet that Shakespeare trusted most 
 to the interest of Lord Herbert, who had access to 
 the Queen, and was influential beyond his years, as 
 shown by his father's letter of thanks to the Queen for 
 her favour to his son (State Papers, 19th September 
 
 1599)- 
 
 Daniel, however, had been tutor at Wilton, and 
 
 had been encouraged to make his first essays in verse 
 
 by his pupil's mother, herself a versifier and the sister 
 
 of Sir Philip Sidney ; so that the desertion of his cause, 
 
 which Shakespeare blamed Lord Herbert for, had at 
 
 least an ostensible excuse. While there can be no 
 
 doubt that the laureateship was actually in competition, 
 
 several aspiring to it, as Davison said, "with hot 
 
 desire," it does not follow that any one got it. Yet 
 
 there is suflficient evidence in Daniel's own works that 
 
 he became, as he supposed, the Laureate in 1599, and 
 
 that he was in receipt of the Queen's bounty, in one 
 
 form or another, before 1601. The best evidence is 
 
 that he thanked the Queen, in a dedication of his folio 
 
 of 1601, for some substantial favour which had placed 
 
 him in ease and comfort : 
 
 I who, by that most blessed hand sustain'd, 
 
 In quietness do eat the bread of rest. 
 And by that all-reviving power obtain'd 
 
 That comfort which my Muse and me hath blest. 
 
 The obvious meaning of these lines has been missed 
 hitherto, owing to the mistake of Daniel's recent editor 
 in taking " Her Sacred Majestie " to have been Anne, 
 queen-consort of James I. (who made Daniel one of the 
 grooms of her chamber previous to 1607), although 
 the date is 1601, her Majesty the hereditary reigning 
 
 him in his studies, promising him preferment, and had him sworn her 
 servant in ordinary." The tide of "servant in ordinary" was as 
 near as any poet attained to the laureateship during the interregnum. 
 Davies was in alliance with Ben Jonson, who is said to have helped him 
 with the verses for the lottery at the Chancellor's in 1601, afterwards 
 published with the initials of Davies in the 2nd edition of the Poetical 
 Rapsodie, 1608. 
 
 41 
 
THE LAUREL CROWN 
 
 sovereign, and her name given as Eliza. The quietness 
 and comfort in which he was eating the bread of rest 
 in 1 60 1 correspond exactly with the picture of him in 
 his house and garden " in Old Street, nigh London," 
 where he "would be obscure for two months together," 
 as Fuller says. His easy circumstances have been 
 referred to his Court employment under James I. and 
 the Queen ; but we have his own word for it that they 
 began under Elizabeth, and the best explanation of 
 " that comfort which my Muse and me hath blest " 
 is some benefice in lieu of the poet's pension. There 
 is, indeed, evidence in a letter of 8th April 1595, from 
 Fulke Greville to Sir R. Cecil, that the Queen had 
 promised Daniel so many years in reversion of the 
 parsonage of Shawflete in the Isle of Wight, which up 
 to that time he had not got : " Sir, you shall do a good 
 deed to help the poor man ; many will thank you." 
 But it was Lord Mountjoy who came to his rescue in 
 1595 as a private patron ; and it is significant that, in 
 dedicating his quarto of 1599 to that nobleman, he 
 speaks of his help in the past tense as if he had become 
 independent of him, hoping to repay his patron's former 
 kindness by conferring fame on him — " I that lived by 
 thee would have thee live with me." 
 
 One more piece of evidence should settle the question 
 whether Daniel thought himself the Laureate or not. 
 It is derived from the symbolism and blazonry of his 
 title-pages in the years 1599, 1601, and 1603. The 
 1599 quarto of his works is a composite volume of five 
 poems, which had all been printed off with separate 
 sheet-marks, and four ' with separate engraved title- 
 pages. The three first of these are either the old 
 plainly -engraved title of 1595 or modifications of it ; 
 but the last in the volume, and presumably the latest 
 executed, being a new title to Cleopatra, is an alto- 
 gether original design, which should mean either that 
 the author was now Poet Laureate or that he was 
 expecting his patent for the office. At the left upper 
 
 42 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S DISAPPOINTMENT 
 
 corner of the border is a female figure with a quill-pen 
 in her right hand, and a laurel crown held aloft in her 
 left hand. The corresponding figure on the right is 
 blowing the trumpet of fame. At the foot of the 
 border, on either side, are the supporters of Elizabeth's 
 arms, the lion and dragon. The cross-piece of the 
 border over the title is ornamented with a pair of 
 laurel sprigs, which are overhung by a pair of broad 
 oak-leaves. The folio of 1601 has the full royal arms 
 of Elizabeth both on the title-page and at the head 
 of the page of dedication. The Panegyricke Congratu- 
 latorie, which was delivered to James I. at Burleigh 
 Harrington, Rutlandshire, in his progress to London 
 in the spring of 1603, also bears the Elizabethan royal 
 arms : the poem itself, some sixty stanzas long, is just 
 such as the Poet Laureate would have hastened to 
 compose for the occasion. 
 
 Those appear to have been the actual circumstances 
 of the affair of the Laurel Crown, so far as Shakespeare 
 himself knew them at the moment. "What transpired 
 afterwards put an altogether different face upon it than 
 the mere rivalry of Daniel ; it appeared that that ex- 
 cellent poet and inoffensive man was only a stopgap : 
 Shakespeare was refused the laurel, but no one else got 
 it while he lived. The real meaning and motive of his 
 exclusion will appear after his relations with Lord 
 Southampton have been brought to light in subsequent 
 chapters. As soon as he was informed, in a half-official 
 and wholly friendly way, by Fulke Greville, at the 
 instance of the Queen (as I conjecture for a reason 
 given later), that he was not to get the patent for the 
 office and pension, he wrote to Lord Herbert the 87 th 
 Sonnet, which is as witty as all the rest and more caustic 
 than most : 
 
 Farewell ! thou art too dear for my possessing. 
 And like enough thou know'st thy estimate. 
 The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing, 
 My bonds in thee are all determinate. 
 
 43 
 
THE LAUREL CROWN 
 
 For how do I hold thee but by thy granting ? 
 
 And for that riches where is my deserving ? 
 
 The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting ; 
 
 And so my patent bacic again is swerving. 
 
 Thyself thou gaVst thy own worth then not knowing, 
 
 Or me to whom thou gav'st it else mistaking. 
 
 So thy great gift upon misprision growing 
 
 Comes home again, on better judgement making. 
 Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter. 
 In sleep a King, but waking no such matter. 
 
 The meaning of all this is so obvious in the context 
 in which I have placed it, that it does not seem necessary 
 to add one word of comment. And yet this sonnet 
 has been always there, the next in order after the series 
 of nine upon the Rival Poet, without any one seeing 
 what his expected patent meant, or what kind of king 
 he was in his dreams. He aspired to be Poet Laureate, 
 and he was sore at his failure. The degree in which he 
 felt his disappointment comes out also in the impassioned 
 90th Sonnet, although it was only a " petty grief" in 
 comparison with the loss of Lord Herbert's friendship, 
 which seemed imminent from another cause : 
 
 Then hate me when thou wilt ; if ever, now ; 
 
 Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross, 
 
 Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow. 
 
 And do not drop in for an after loss. 
 
 Ah, do not, when my heart hath 'scapt this sorrow. 
 
 Come in the rearward of a conquered woe ; 
 
 Give not a windy night a rainy morrow, 
 
 To linger out a purposed overthrow. 
 
 If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last. 
 
 When other petty griefs have done their spite. 
 
 But in the onset come ; so shall I taste 
 
 At first the very worst of fortune's might. 
 
 And other strains of woe, which now seem woe. 
 Compared with loss of thee, will not seem so. 
 
 44 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 MISTRESS FITTON 
 
 The identity of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets with 
 Mary Fitton, a maid-of-honour to Queen Elizabeth 
 from 1596 to 1 60 1, was alleged first by Mr. Thomas 
 Tyler in 1884, on the ground that she could be shown, 
 by letters and other documents of the time, to be the 
 person with whom Lord Pembroke was involved in a 
 scandal. In 1897 Lady Newdigate-Newdegate printed 
 with a commentary, under the title of Gossip from a 
 Muniment Room, a number of letters addressed to Mary 
 Fitton's elder sister Anne, Lady Newdigate, including 
 one from the maid-of-honour herself (which is notable 
 only for a tendency to run into iambic verse). This 
 correspondence proved interesting for the present subject 
 chiefly as showing that Mary Fitton had another lover. 
 Sir William Knollys, Comptroller of the Household. 
 Hitherto there has been nothing^to connect Shakespeare 
 with this lady, except the internal evidence from his 
 Sonnets that his mistress and Lord Pembroke's was 
 one and the same. The internal evidence, which will 
 appear in due course, ought to suffice ; but I am now 
 able to supplement it by a new proof of the fact from 
 outside, which shall be given at once. 
 
 The scandal in which Lord Pembroke's name was 
 joined with Mistress Fitton's became known early in 
 1 60 1, when the lady's condition became apparent. It 
 is thus referred to in a letter of 26th January from Sir 
 John Stanhope to Sir George Carew, the President of 
 
 45 
 
MISTRESS FITTON 
 
 Munster : " Of the persecution which is likely to befall 
 the poor maids' chamber in Court, and of Fitton's 
 afflictions, and lastly her commitment to my Lady 
 Hawkyns, and the discouragement thereby of the rest, 
 though it be now out of your element to think of, yet I 
 doubt not but that some friend doth more particularly 
 advertise you." This is the fluttering of the dovecot 
 that comes into an unprlnted ballad of the year 1601, 
 preserved among the State Papers (Eliz., vol. 278, 
 No. 23), in which the Maids' Chamber, or the Queen's 
 Household in general, represented as a herd of deer, is 
 the subject of the second stanza (the Lord Chamberlain 
 being the subject of the first. Sir Robert Cecil of the 
 third, and Raleigh of the seventh and last) : 
 
 Chamberlin, Chamberlin, 
 He's of her Grace's kin. 
 Fool hath he ever bin, 
 With his puny silver pin, 
 Fair writhout, foul within. 
 She makes his coxcomb thin 
 And quake in every limb. 
 Quicksilver's in his head 
 But his wit's dull as lead. 
 Lord, for thy pity ! 
 
 II 
 Parti beard was afeard 
 When they ran at the herd ; 
 The Raine dear was imbost. 
 The white doe she was lost ; 
 Pembrooke strook her down 
 And took her from the clown. 
 Lord, for thy pity ! 
 
 Ill 
 
 Little Cecil creeps up and down, 
 He rules Bet, court, and crown. 
 With his brother Burlie clown 
 In his great fox-furr'd gown. 
 With the long proclamation 
 He swore he sav'd the town. 
 Is it not likely ? 
 46 
 
TOOK HER FROM THE CLOWN " 
 
 Rawleigh doth true bestride. 
 He sits 'twixt wind and tide ; 
 Yet uphill he cannot ride 
 For all his bloody pride. 
 He seeks taxes in the tin. 
 He polls the poor to the skin ; 
 Yet he swears it is no sin. 
 Lord, for thy pity ! 
 
 " Parti beard " seems to be a nickname of the Comp- 
 troller of the Household, Sir William Knollys ; the 
 " Raine dear " is the Queen {la reine) ; " imbost " or 
 embossed is a hunting term with the secondary meaning 
 of enraged (as in 'Antony and Cleopatra,' IV, xiii. 3) ; 
 the " white doe " is Mistress Fitton ; and the " clown " 
 from whom Pembroke took her is of course a player, 
 and who but Shakespeare ? ^ The reference in the 
 stanza upon Cecil to the "long proclamation" with 
 which " he swore he saved the town," dates the ballad 
 after the 9th of February 1601, the proclamation 
 being that which followed the rebellion of the Earl of 
 Essex on the 8 th of February. The author of the 
 ballad may be guessed to be the old poet Thomas 
 Churchyard, on the following grounds : It is written 
 in the doggerel manner of Skelton, for whom Church- 
 yard professed a great admiration (he is buried next to 
 him in St. Margaret's, Westminster), having himself 
 begun to write in Edward VI.'s reign, when Skelton's 
 vogue was greatest. Secondly, it has Churchyard's 
 known eccentricities of spelling : for example, in the 
 first stanza puny is " ponne " ; in the second, afeard is 
 " aferd,' while herd is " heard " ; and in the stanza 
 upon Raleigh " polls " the poor is " pawles," which is 
 nearly the same as in one of his printed poems, " the 
 
 ' The allegory of the herd of deer may have been chosen in order to 
 point at the lines in ' Titus Andronicus,' which was published the year 
 before (II. i, 93) : 
 
 What, hast thou not full often struck a doe, 
 And borne her cleanly by the keeper's nose ? 
 
 47 
 
MISTRESS FITTON 
 
 poure to powll," and to " powU and shave." Lastly, 
 Churchyard lived at the Court end of the town, a 
 gentleman by birth and associations, subsisting in his 
 old age on the bounty of Dr. Julius Caesar, Master of 
 the Requests and legal adviser attendant on the Queen's 
 person, so that he was in all respects a likely person to 
 pick up Court scandal and put it into SkeltonicaJ verse. 
 
 Besides the evidence of the Sonnets themselves, there 
 is also internal evidence from ' Love's Labour's Lost ' 
 that Shakespeare was acquainted with the Dark Lady 
 before he knew Herbert, and from ' The Two Gentle- 
 men of Verona ' that he used their first quarrel about 
 her, in 1598, as a motive in that comedy. First as to 
 these plays. 
 
 'Love's Labour's Lost,' with the text as we now 
 have it, was published in 1598, "As it was presented 
 before her Highnes this last Christmas. Newly corrected 
 and augmented by W. Shakspere." The Princess of 
 France, with three ladies in waiting, is sent by her 
 ailing father on a mission to the King of Navarre, who 
 is in retirement in the country with three of his lords, 
 having taken vows to study and to avoid the society of 
 women. The king and his three courtiers are in this 
 fix, that they owe hospitality to their fair visitors, but 
 their vows forbid : 
 
 King. Hear me, dear lady : I have sworn an oath. 
 
 Prin. Our Lady help my lord ! he'll be forsworn. 
 
 King. Not for the world, fair madam, by my wijl, 
 
 Prin. Why, will shall break it, wjll and nothingelse. 
 
 On this Mr. Grant White comments, that it is quite 
 probable that Shakespeare himself played the king in 
 the performance at Court (it is known that he was 
 often employed there), and that there is a pun upon 
 his name in the above dialogue, just as in Sonnets 135 
 and 136: the conversation and reply are too forced, 
 he thinks, not to have that object. But the person 
 who is really set to break down the vow by his casuistry, 
 
 48 
 
AS ROSALINE 
 
 or to provide " some salve for perjury," is not the king, 
 but the Lord Biron (Berowne), by his great speech at 
 the end of Act IV. The part of Biron is made for 
 Shakespeare in several respects, including the important 
 one of age (" an older Noble of Navar, the lover of 
 Rosalin"). He is so much Shakespeare himself all 
 through the play that Brandes, in his recent work, 
 calls him Biron-Shakespeare. Now Rosaline, to whom 
 he played Biron, is the same in features and character 
 as the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Biron soliloquises, 
 III. i. 197 : 
 
 And among three to love the worst of all, 
 
 A whitly wanton with a velvet brow, ^ 
 
 With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes ; 
 
 Ay — and, by heaven, one that will do the deed 
 
 Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard. 
 
 And I to sigh for her, to watch for her. 
 
 To pray for her : Go to, it is a plague 
 
 That Cupid will impose for my neglect 
 
 Of his almighty dreadful little wight. 
 
 Well, I will love, write, sigh, pray, sue, groan : 
 
 Some men must love my lady, and some Joan. 
 
 There are indications in the margin of the play 
 (1598) that it had been written for a small private 
 stage. One ought not to say adapted, although the 
 experts are resolved that it must have existed in an 
 earlier form years before Christmas 1597, — because it 
 has so many rhyming verses ! As if it were not as 
 natural for ' Love's Labour's Lost ' to have rhyming 
 lines as it is for farce or burlesque at any time I As 
 it was written for the Court, it is probable that the 
 female parts, unless perhaps that of the country wench, 
 were played by lady amateurs, and that at least two 
 of the King of Navarre's courtiers were played by 
 young men of Elizabeth's Court — Dumaine by Lord 
 Southampton, and Long-a-will, " a tall young noble of 
 Navar " (with an obviously intended change of spelling 
 from Longueville), by some tall young courtier whose 
 familiar name was "Will." The ladies have masks, 
 
 49 E 
 
MISTRESS FITTON 
 
 not only in the scene which turns upon an exchange of 
 masks, but also on their first appearance (Act II. So. i. 
 124). The ladies of Elizabeth's Court are known to 
 have acted in masques or allegories, which were primarily 
 designed for the splendid dresses and the dances, but 
 were not without declamation or even dialogue ; there 
 was a famous one of the kind at the Russell marriage 
 at Blackfriars, in June 1600, in which Mary Fitton 
 took the lead (she was devoted to the stage). The 
 objection to women on the stage applied only to the 
 public theatres, and even for these it did not obtain 
 in Italy at that time. 
 
 Mistress Mary Fitton is so like the Lady Rosaline 
 of the Christmas comedy of 1597, that it looks as 
 if the part, had been written for her. The chief dis- 
 crepancy, both in that play and in the Sonnets, is that 
 in her authentic portraits her eyes are painted as dark 
 blue-grey and her hair as dark brown. Mr. Tyler, 
 however, has satisfied himself that her hair is black 
 in her painted marble efKgy in Gawsworth Church ; the 
 shade of brown in the hair of the portrait may have 
 been a liberty taken by the artist. It is not necessary 
 to take Shakespeare's references to her dark eyes to 
 mean the iris as black as the pupil, which is an un- 
 usual blackness of the eye. The " two pitch balls 
 stuck in her face " is an obvious hyperbole ; while in 
 the Sonnets he seems to be reserving something : 
 for he says in one, "her eyes so suited" to her 
 raven brows that "they mourners seem," and in 
 another, that they have "put on black, and loving 
 mourners be." In the later of her two portraits, taken 
 probably about 1600, when she was at the height of 
 her favour with the Queen, she is in full Court dress — 
 a high-bred, slender figure above medium height, with 
 white hands and long taper fingers, a grey-white com- 
 plexion, handsome eyes, a small mouth, full lips, a 
 retreating chin, and somewhat demure expression. The 
 striking features, both of her and her sister, are the 
 
 5° 
 
THE WHITE DOE 
 
 great sloping forehead, with the mass of dark hair 
 drawn back and surmounted by a tire, and the some- 
 what long nose in line with the brow, making a bird- 
 like profflie. Her brows are Rosaline's commanding 
 feature: "Who dares look upon the heaven of her 
 brow that is not blinded by her majesty ? " Again, he 
 seems to have the same brows, consequently the very 
 person, in mind where Falstaff tells Mrs. Ford, playing 
 the part with a plain kerchief over the brows, that he 
 wishes he could make her my lady : " Thou hast the 
 right arched bent of the brow, that becomes the ship- 
 tire, the tire-valiant, or any tire of Venetian admittance." 
 The "white doe" of the ballad is really a very apt 
 description of the lady's features, according to the 
 portrait of her at Arbury, and was probably one of 
 her pet names. Shakespeare's " whitly wanton with 
 a velvet brow" is just the " white doe." A white doe, 
 of course, has black points ; and the eyes would look 
 lustrous black from the wide pupil, even if the iris be 
 dark blue-grey. The lady of the Sonnets had cheeks 
 like the grey of the dawn set off by the morning sun, 
 and hair like " black wires." Ariosto's Alcyna had 
 exactly the same resplendent black eyes, and hair like 
 " golden wires." 
 
 Soon after Shakespeare's acquaintance with young 
 Herbert began, in the spring of 1598, the latter had 
 got to know also the lady who was the poet's mistress : 
 one can imagine a meeting between my Lord Rose and 
 my Lady Rosaline. The Sonnets do not leave us any 
 choice in conceiving the sense in which the Dark Lady 
 was Shakespeare's mistress : in whatever witty pleas- 
 antries the acquaintance may have begun, it became an 
 ordinary amour at length, as appears from S. 138, 
 which was printed surreptitiously as early as 1599. 
 She tried to capture Lord Herbert, or Lord Herbert 
 tried to capture her. Shakespeare forgave the "tres- 
 pass " when Herbert begged pardon, although he accuses 
 himself of being more corrupt as an accessory to the 
 
 51 
 
MISTRESS FITTON 
 
 theft than if he had been the principal, and therefore 
 will avoid Herbert in public — 
 
 Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame. 
 
 The situation is almost exactly that which he has created 
 in ' The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' Valentine, " that 
 peasant" (V. i. 36) being Shakespeare and Proteus 
 Herbert : it looks, indeed, as if the name Proteus were 
 implied in S. 53 : 
 
 What is your substance, whereof are you made. 
 That millions of strange shadows on you tend ? 
 
 Proteus plays him false with Silvia, and expresses heart- 
 felt sorrow for what he had done; whereupon Valentine 
 forgives him like a Christian, and hands the lady over 
 to him. In five or six of the eight sonnets to Herbert 
 on the theft of the mistress, there are peculiar senti- 
 ments or phrases, which can be matched closely in 'The 
 Two Gentlemen of Verona,' although it would not be 
 so easy to match them anywhere else. One set of 
 commentators have been as much surprised at the 
 supine conduct of Valentine in the play as another set 
 have been surprised at Shakespeare's own conduct in 
 the Sonnets. There seems little doubt that he recalled 
 the situation deliberately in the play in order that he 
 might treat it exactly as he had done in real life. We 
 know from Meres that he had the play in his desk in 
 the autumn of 1598, and there is not another known 
 reference to it, earlier or later, until its appearance in 
 print in the folio of 1623. Johnson was struck by the 
 number of its gnomic sayings and " eminently beautiful" 
 single lines or passages ; while Pope could not under- 
 stand why a play of such " natural and unaffected style" 
 should have been diagnosed by the experts to be " one 
 of the first he wrote." Whether on the ground of 
 internal evidence or of external, there is absolutely no 
 reason for dating it before 1598. The hurried con- 
 clusion of the play proves nothing as to early date ; 
 
 52 
 
HER THREE WILLS 
 
 for the same evidence of haste is found in * As You 
 Like It,' which was certainly new in 1 599 or 1 600. 
 
 This comedy has a bearing upon the Sonnets in 
 another way. Silvia has a third lover, Sir Thurio, a 
 " foolish " rival to Valentine, but a personage of some 
 rank at the Court of Milan. Shakespeare's mistress 
 had also three lovers. The alert eyes of Mr. William 
 Archer were the first to discover that there were really 
 three Wills in S. 135 : 
 
 Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will, 
 And Will to boot, and Will in overplus ; 
 More than enough am I that vex thee still. 
 To thy sweet will making addition thus. 
 
 When the Gossip from a Muniment Room appeared, 
 the suspected third Will was forthcoming at once in 
 the person of Sir William Knollys, Comptroller of the 
 Queen's Household, and a cousin to her Majesty once 
 removed. He is the " parti- beard " of the ballad, 
 who was " afeard " when the scandal arose. He was 
 about fifty-five years old in 1598, and married to a 
 dowager-countess of great wealth and of more years 
 than his own. His lodging at Court was next door 
 to the Maids' Chamber, the high jinks of which were 
 apt to disturb his peace : L'Estrange relates that he 
 struck terror into his noisy neighbours one night by 
 walking into their room in his shirt through the postern 
 door, and pacing it for an hour so intent upon his book 
 as to seem unconscious of any human presence. When 
 Mary Fitton came to Court in 1595 or 1596, aged 
 seventeen or eighteen, her father had begged Knollys, 
 a connection of the Fittons, to watch over her. Sir 
 William replied, " I will not fail to fulfil your desire 
 in playing the good shepherd, and will to my power 
 defend the innocent lamb from the wolfish cruelty and 
 fox-like subtlety of the tame beasts of this place." His 
 letters to her sister Anne, which begin about 1597-98, 
 exhibit him as Mary's avowed lover and suitor, and 
 
 53 
 
MISTRESS FITTON 
 
 as praying (and asking his correspondent to pray) that 
 he might be released from his aged wife so that he 
 might marry her and beget offspring. In a letter early 
 in 1598, when his correspondent was expecting her 
 first confinement, he wishes her "a good delivery of 
 your burden, and your sister in the same case justifiable," 
 Again : " She is now well, and hath not been troubled 
 with the mother [hysteria] of a long time. I would 
 to God I might as lawfully make her a mother as you 
 are." In another letter : " Her greatest fear is, that 
 while the grass groweth the horse may starve, and she 
 thinketh a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand. 
 But both she and I must have patience." After her 
 disgrace in 1601, for which Lord Pembroke was 
 plausibly but wrongly blamed, he wrote : "I must 
 confess the harvest was over long expected. . . . The 
 man of sin [not Pembroke] having in the night sowed 
 tares amongst the good corn, both the true husband- 
 man was beguiled and the good ground abused." In 
 1603, when she was with her sister in Warwickshire, 
 he sent her a message that he could not " separate 
 his thoughts from the remembrance of former bands " ; 
 " no earthly creature is mistress of my love, nor is like 
 to be " ; if he were not tied to a white staff at Court, 
 he would become a knight adventurer on her behalf. 
 It is clear, however, that the lady answered these 
 strangely renewed overtures either curtly or not at all. 
 His wife died in 1605, and in two months after he 
 married Lady Elizabeth Howard, aged nineteen. Sir 
 William was one of Elizabeth's Privy Council and a 
 member of Parliament ; in her speech from the Throne 
 at the prorogation of the Parliament before Christmas 
 1 60 1 she gave Mr. Comptroller, along with Mr. 
 Speaker, her special thanks for his services. The 
 Queen also gave him a pension of forty pounds a year 
 in July 1 601 (MS. Patent Enrolments), paid him a visit 
 at his house. Grays, near Caversham, in the autumn, 
 and promoted him to be Treasurer of the Household 
 
 54 
 
SIR WILLIAM KNOLLYS 
 
 at Christmas 1602. James I. made him a baron and 
 a viscount and a Knight of the Garter, and Charles I. 
 raised him to the earldom of Banbury. 
 
 It is by the merest accident that we know of his 
 long courtship of Mary Fitton, and of his ardent 
 desire to be free to marry her, which perhaps few knew 
 of at the time. In one of his letters to her sister he 
 wrote, " Burn my letters, if you please " ; but they 
 were not burned, — they are actually printed, and in a 
 second edition ! Sir William was by no means a 
 libertine, but a studious religious man. His father, 
 Sir Francis, was zealous in the Protestant cause, and 
 chose as his son's tutor one who was so well disposed 
 to bear witness, that he suffered at the stake in the 
 persecutions under Mary. Sir William, thus brought 
 up, was always something of a Puritan. It has been 
 surmised that his phrase " the true husbandman," con- 
 trasting with "the man of sin," implies an informal 
 contract, and that this was what Shakespeare meant in 
 addressing Mistress Fitton in the phrase of S. 152, 
 " in act thy bed-vow broke." If that be so, he meant 
 also that she broke her bed-vow with the other party to 
 it, the vow being pre-nuptial. In ' Love's Labour's 
 Lost ' a certain question and answer are brought in with 
 no apparent object, and probably with some veiled 
 reference which those present at Court in 1597 would 
 understand : the question is asked by Biron, about 
 Rosaline (according to the Cambridge editors), who 
 wore a cap : 
 
 Biron. Is she wedded or no ? 
 
 Boyet. To her will, sir, or so. 
 
 This looks like the ever-recurring pun upon Will ; 
 and it is not impossible that " or so " means that Sir 
 William was understood to be contracted to the maid- 
 of-honour, pending the demise of the old Lady 
 Chandos, his wife. 
 
 " Fitton's afflictions and her commitment to my 
 
 55 
 
MISTRESS FITTON 
 
 Lady Hawkyns " are heard of first in the letter of 26th 
 January 1601, to Sir G. Carew, in Ireland. On 5th 
 February Sir Robert Cecil wrote also to him: "We 
 have no news, but that there is' a misfortune befallen 
 Mistress Fitton, for she is proved with child, and the 
 Earl of Pembroke, being examined, confesseth a fact, 
 but utterly renounceth all marriage. I fear they will 
 both dwell in the Tower a while, for the Queen hath 
 vowed to send them thither." On 25th March Sir 
 Tobie Mathew wrote to Dudley Carleton : " The Earl 
 of Pembroke is committed to the Fleet. His cause is 
 delivered of a boy, who is dead." On 22nd April Sir 
 Edward Fitton wrote to his daughter Anne : " I am in 
 some hope of your sister's enlargement, but what will be 
 the end with the Earl I cannot tell." On his way down 
 into Cheshire with her, in a stolen flight from London, 
 Sir Edward Fitton wrote to Sir Robert Cecil on i6th 
 May from Stanner, where he was resting owing to his 
 daughter's weakness : "I can say nothing of the Earl, 
 but my daughter is confident in her chance before God, 
 and wisheth my Lord and she might but meet before in 
 different scenes. But for myself I expect no good 
 from him, that in all this time hath not showed any 
 kindness. I count my daughter as good a gentlewoman 
 as my Lord is, though [excepting] the dignity of 
 honour, which hath beguiled her, I fear, except my 
 Lord's honesty be the greater virtuous." ^ It appears 
 from a letter of Pembroke's from Whitehall, 8 th May, 
 touching the renewal of a bill, that he was then at large 
 again. 
 
 We may now return to the Sonnets. Herbert's 
 first affair with the Dark Lady does not appear to have 
 
 1 Letter among the Cecil Papers, printed by Mr. Tyler. The use of 
 " virtuous " at the end appears to be in the same sense as that of " virtue " 
 in the last line of the 1 1 7th Sonnet, said of the same person, in his relation 
 to the same lady : 
 
 Since my appeal says I did strive to prove 
 
 The conitancy and virtue of your love, — 
 
 meaning generosity, or more than bare duty. 
 
 S6 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S LAMENESS 
 
 been so serious as Shakespeare suspected at the time ; 
 for he wrote later in S. 70 (spring of 1599) : 
 
 Thou hast pass'd by the ambush of young days. 
 Either not assail'd, or victor being charged ; 
 
 and in S, 144, which was printed surreptitiously in 1599, 
 the lady is referred to as " wooing his purity with her 
 foul pride." But after that, and more especially after the 
 episode of the rival poet, he writes several sonnets to 
 Herbert on his licentiousness (which Clarendon does 
 not extenuate in his character), making references 
 to a base jewel on a queen's finger and to his own 
 "lameness" (the lameness of Vulcan as the cause of 
 the infidelity of Venus: compare Odyssey, viii. 310, 
 Davison's epigram " On a limping cuckold," and the 
 " lame and impotent " of ' Othello '), the phrase being 
 the same that was used in S. 37 on the occasion of 
 Herbert's original trespass. This was probably the 
 time, the summer of 1599, to which belongs a piece of 
 gossip printed by Mr. Tyler from a paper in the 
 Record Office : it relates to certain clandestine marriages 
 " at the Courte, in that tyme that M''^' Fytton was in 
 great favour, and one of her Majesties maids of honor ; 
 and duringe the time that the Earle of Pembrooke 
 favord her, she would put oiF her head tire and tucke 
 upp her clothes, and take a large white cloake, and 
 marche as though she had bene a man, to meete the 
 said Earle out of the Courte." 
 
 We hear a good deal about Lord Herbert at this 
 time in the letters written from London to his uncle, 
 Sir Robert Sidney, at Flushing. He was much with 
 the Court at Nonesuch and Hampton Court. On 4th 
 August 1599, "Lord Herbert means to follow the 
 camp," and wants a certain horse of his uncle's from 
 the stables at Penshurst : this was the muster on 
 account of the threatened Spanish invasion, to which 
 the Earl, his father, furnished two hundred mounted 
 
 57 
 
MISTRESS FITTON 
 
 men. The muster of August 1599 was almost certainly 
 the occasion of S. 91 : 
 
 Some glory in their birth, some in their skill, 
 
 — and "some in their horse." In October Herbert 
 went on an embassy to Denmark ("great entertain- 
 ment "). Shortly after his return he went to his father 
 in Wiltshire, and was away from London several months, 
 until March 1600, being ill most of the time with "a 
 tertian ague," and with continual pains in his head. 
 This illness was so serious that an attempted journey to 
 London in February had to be given up. Meanwhile 
 Mistress Fitton had to leave her duties at Court for 
 several weeks. On 1 2th January 1 600, " Mrs. Fitton 
 is sick, and gone from Court to her father." She had 
 not really left London, for, on 21st February, "My 
 lady [Sir R. Sidney's wife] visited Mrs. Fitton, that 
 hath long been here sick in London." The " sickness " 
 appears to have been the natural fruit of her amour 
 with Lord Herbert, for it corresponds exactly in time 
 with the incident of the same kind which forms the 
 subject of the 99th Sonnet, written in the early spring 
 of 1 600 : 
 
 The forward violet thus did I chide : — 
 
 " Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells, 
 
 If not from my love's breath ? The purple pride 
 
 Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells 
 
 In my love's veins thou hast too grossly dyed." 
 
 These lines, and the following allegory of roses, 
 become intelligible in the hypothesis of a still-born 
 premature child : 
 
 The Roses fearfully on thorns did stand. 
 One blushing shame, another white despair ; 
 A third, nor red nor white, had stolen of both, 
 And to his robbery had annex'd thy breath ; 
 But, for his theft, in pride of all his growth 
 A vengeful canker eat him up to death. 
 
 The forward violet is the premature flower of spring ; 
 
 58 
 
THE CANKERED ROSEBUD 
 
 the violet is a small pansy ; and the pansy was the 
 Fitton emblem. The sonnet is singular in having 
 fifteen lines, the extra line being the fifth — 
 
 In my love's veins thou hast too grossly dyed. 
 
 To express both its form and its matter, it might be 
 headed " A superfluous line," a " Hne " too many, an 
 unwished-for progeny. This interpretation of S. 99 is 
 necessary as a key to nearly all those that follow to 
 the end. 
 
 The sonnets from 100 to the fall of the curtain in 
 S. 125 are the most enigmatic of the whole series. 
 The obscurity is less often playful than sombre, with 
 a tone of irony which rises before the end to sarcasm. 
 They are the sonnets that show in the highest degree 
 the quality of " deep brained " which he claims for the 
 sonnet as a lyric form. This point has been touched 
 upon already, and it remains only to add here, that in a 
 farcical dialogue in ' Love's Labour's Lost ' he defines 
 the purpose of the envoi : 
 
 No, page : it is an epilogue or discourse to make plain 
 Some obscure precedence that hath before been sain. 
 
 Most of this sequence have not only an obscure pre- 
 cedence but also the envoi obscure, yet the clarifying or 
 crystallising function of the latter is shown very curiously 
 in some of them. It is not, however, a question of 
 structure that must concern us here, nor even admira- 
 tion of their depth, ingenuity, delicacy, and subtlety, 
 which Shakespeare displays nowhere more than in these 
 five-and-twenty sonnets ; but it is the personal matter 
 of them, or the story in them. It is the same story 
 that has been outlined from external and authentic 
 sources at the beginning of the chapter ; but here we 
 have it proceeding from week to week in the corre- 
 spondence between the poet and Lord Herbert. Mistress 
 Fitton's second misfortune (the first that was known to 
 the world), the hapless infant which cost all that pain to 
 
 59 
 
MISTRESS FITTON 
 
 seek Its father, must have been known to Shakespeare 
 sooner than most. It is clear that he had been in the 
 lady's confidence, and that he did all he could to save 
 her from the disaster which overtook her before long. 
 There was only one way to do it — to induce Lord 
 Herbert to own the coming child, and to "justify " the 
 mother by marriage, as Lord Southampton had done 
 just two years before in the case of another of the 
 maids of honour, Mistress Vernon. The moral ground 
 of this stratagem was the previous still-born fruit, of 
 which Herbert was actually the father ; there was no 
 legal or equitable claim upon him at all in the second 
 case, as Shakespeare knew. The poet was not influential 
 in such a matter, but he could be at least tenderly per- 
 suasive, and he could dazzle by his amazing skill, and 
 perhaps gain his end by his wit. 
 
 The arduous enterprise begins, in the looth Sonnet, 
 with a formal invocation of the Muse, which is prolonged 
 into the next. There had been a long break in the 
 correspondence, from the spring of 1600 until about 
 the first weeks of 160 1 : 
 
 Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget'st so long, — 
 
 and so on to the practical matter which was his object 
 in resuming correspondence with Lord Herbert : 
 
 Then do thy office, Muse ; I teach thee how 
 To make him seem long hence as he shows now. 
 
 This is the constant theme of the first series of seventeen 
 sonnets, when the project was of another marriage : 
 
 Who will believe my verse in time to come, . . . 
 
 And stretched metre of an antique song. 
 
 But were some child of yours alive that time, 
 You should live twice — in it, and in my rhyme. 
 
 The first pointed hint is in S. 103 : 
 
 Look in your glass, and there appears a face 
 That over-goes my blunt invention quite. 
 Dulling my lines, and doing me disgrace. 
 60 
 
THE IMPENDING CHILD 
 
 His glass was not his looking-glass, but his divining- 
 glass. Herbert would see in it the face of something 
 impending, a face that was quite beyond the power of 
 the poet's blunt invention to fashion, that dulled his 
 lines, and did him disgrace. 
 
 The next, "To me, fair friend, you never can be 
 old," contains the recital of the seasons which had passed 
 since their acquaintance began,- with the emphasis on 
 the Autumn seasons, " childing autumn," as he calls it 
 elsewhere. This leads up to something called " beauty " 
 that was moving imperceptibly from its " figure " like 
 the hand upon a dial, " and no pace perceived " : 
 
 So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand, 
 
 Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived. 
 For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred. 
 Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead. 
 
 The three next sonnets are an interruption of the 
 argument, the occasions being Lord Herbert's accession 
 to the earldom of Pembroke, the poet's visit to Salisbury 
 to' bear the canopy at the old earl's funeral, and the 
 rebellion of Lord Essex on the 8 th of February 1601. 
 The 1 08th is the most explicit hitherto in suggesting to 
 his lordship that the former still-born child should 
 count for the coming one in respect of the paternity ; 
 this is done under the figurative cover, as always, of 
 their own constancy to each other : 
 
 What's in the brain that ink may character, 
 Which hath not figur'd to you my true spirit, 
 What's new to speak, what new to register. 
 That may express my love, or thy dear merit ? 
 Nothing, sweet boy ; but yet, like prayers divine, 
 I must each day say o'er the very same. 
 Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine, 
 Even as when first I hallow'd thy fair name. 
 So that eternal love, in love's fresh ease. 
 Weighs not the dust and injury of age. 
 Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place. 
 But makes antiquity for aye his page, 
 
 Finding the first conceit of love there bred 
 Where time and outward form would show it dead 
 61 
 
MISTRESS FITTON 
 
 Observe the function of the envoi to make plain the 
 obscure precedence. The terms are all physiological 
 in their literal sense — conception, generation, formation, 
 and death ; it is the former offspring which, although 
 dead, was still the first conceit of love, and should live 
 eternally as a moral obligation. 
 
 The next four sonnets appear to have been called 
 forth as a reply to something that Lord Pembroke (as 
 he now was) had said in expostulation. They are all 
 concerned with the poet's own disabilities in his humble 
 station of life, and contain several incidental things of 
 the deepest interest for his career as a playwright and 
 player, some of which are referred to in later chapters. 
 But he sweeps aside all those public worries, to resume 
 his purpose : 
 
 You are so strongly in my purpose bred. 
 
 That all the world methinks besides y' are dead. 
 
 Let us resume the main theme with S. 115, leaving 
 the two preceding it to be taken after. Its ostensible 
 subject is " Love a-growing " : 
 
 Those lines that I before have writ do lie, 
 
 Even those that said I could not love you dearer. 
 
 The ten following lines are turned ingeniously to 
 show how he had been mistaken in setting bounds to 
 the growth of love : this is not to be taken literally ; 
 the whole sonnet is an artifice to lead up to the barbed 
 
 envoi : 
 
 Love is a Babe : then might I not say so, 
 
 To give full growth to that which still doth grow. 
 
 If we recall the fact that Pembroke was about to be, 
 if he were not already, charged with the scandal of 
 Mistress Fitton, the Babe becomes the impending real 
 infant, and no metaphor. The two last lines are meant 
 to bring before him, in one momentary swift glance at 
 " that which still doth grow," the poor lady's condition 
 by its outward show, pathetic always, and calculated to 
 
 62 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S "GREAT MIND" 
 
 afFect every humane man in the way that it used to affect 
 my uncle Toby. 
 
 Let us now go back to the mysterious pair, 113 and 
 114. They are "deep brained" to the last degree. 
 In the former he mentions, as a matter of curious 
 psychological interest, that of late he has been seeing 
 the features of his correspondent in objects and aspects 
 of nature, whether rude or gentle, sweet-favoured or 
 deformed, sea or mountain, day or night ; more especially 
 if his vision sees the Crow or Dove " it shapes them to 
 your feature." He had received so many of these 
 impressions from external objects that his mind was 
 " replete with you " and " incapable of more." The 
 next sonnet continues the idea by bringing in " monsters 
 and things indigest " (unformed embryos), which the 
 poet may have changed by the alchemy of love into 
 " such cherubins as your sweet self resemble " ; so its 
 chief purpose is to put the question, whether this is only 
 " flattery in my seeing " or " mine eye saith true " i" 
 Let the answer be noted : 
 
 Oh, 'tis the first ; 'tis flattery in my seeing, 
 And my great mind most Icingly drinks it up : 
 Mine eye well knows what with his gust is 'greeing. 
 And to his palate doth prepare the cup : 
 If it be poison'd, 'tis the lesser sin, 
 That mine eye loves it and doth first begin. 
 
 The meaning is, that it is flattery to make Lord Pem- 
 broke the father of the child, but that Shakespeare has 
 a " great mind " to do so : if the cup of flattery be a 
 poisoned cup, there is the less sin in offering it to him, 
 in that he is not taken unawares, but has seen it tasted 
 by the king's taster. 
 
 The sonnet following "Love is a Babe" is the 
 famous and noble poem : 
 
 Let me not to the marriage of true minds 
 Admit impediments : love is not love 
 Which alters where it alteration finds. 
 
 63 
 
MISTRESS FITTON 
 
 The form is general or abstract, but the substance is 
 the concrete case of Pembroke " utterly renouncing all 
 marriage " with Mary Fitton. It is a moving appeal, 
 which may or may not have preceded his lordship's 
 refusal of marriage when he was examined at Court. 
 The love that a woman in her trouble has a right to 
 look for is declared in the next lines : 
 
 O no ! it is an ever fixed mark 
 
 That looks on tempests and is never shaken : 
 
 It is the star to every wandering bark. 
 
 The "rosy lips and cheeks" swept away by Time's 
 sickle, and the " brief hours and weeks " that suffice to 
 make Time's changes, point to the special circumstances 
 
 wherein 
 
 Love is not love 
 Which alters where it alteration finds. 
 
 The uncertainty as to what his lordship would do 
 explains the line said of the star in the heavens — 
 
 Whose worth's unknown although his height be taken. 
 
 The two next sonnets, 117 and 118, are Shakespeare's 
 apology for interfering, and are probably the answer to 
 an angry remonstrance as in ' A Lover's Complaint ' : 
 
 Yet if men moved him, was he such a storm, etc. 
 
 In S. 118 the figures are all drawn from dietary and 
 medicines — sharp sauces to whet, and purges to ward 
 off sickness. The suggestion is, not only of going out 
 to meet trouble, but of doing so for another's sake ; 
 while the " policy in love, to anticipate the ills that were 
 not," is more particularly the policy of coming to an 
 understanding as to the paternity of the child before 
 it was born. However, his well-meant attempt had 
 merely the effect of " poisoning " himself. 
 
 Sonnet 119 points to an interview between Shake- 
 speare and the lady, which had probably taken place 
 
 64 
 
THE SIREN'S TEARS 
 
 before the Queen knew of her condition and had 
 committed her to the keeping of Lady Hawkyns : 
 
 What potions have I drunk of Siren tears 
 
 Distill'd from limbecks foul as hell within. 
 
 Applying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears. 
 
 Still losing when I saw myself to win ? 
 
 What wretched errors hath my heart committed, 
 
 Whilst it hath thought itself so blessed never ? 
 
 How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted 
 
 In the distraction of this madding fever ? 
 
 O, benefit of ill ! now I find true, 
 
 That better is by evil still made better ; 
 
 And ruin'd love, when it is built anew. 
 
 Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater. 
 So I return rebuk'd to my content. 
 And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent. 
 
 With the tears there had been confessions, which opened 
 his eyes and filled him with dismay. The close of the 
 sonnet means that the potion of her tears had proved a 
 love philtre, for his ruined love was built anew, fairer, 
 stronger, far greater than at first. We know from 
 Sonnets 147-150 that it was at one time an infatuation. 
 The Siren's tears moved him to some more decided 
 step on her behalf than he had yet taken. In the next 
 sonnet, 120, we learn that he had done some unkindness, 
 trespass, transgression, or tyrannical action against Lord 
 Pembroke, with the result that his lordship had " passed 
 a Hell of time," supposed in the shock of his feelings, 
 but corresponding also with his imprisonment in the 
 Fleet. He sets this unkindness against the unkindness 
 that Herbert had before done to him, and expresses his 
 sorrow that events had moved too fast in their " night 
 of woe " to afFord leisure for applying such a salve to 
 his lordship's wound as the latter had formerly done to 
 his (S. 34). Whether or not he visited Pembroke in 
 prison to fulfil that purpose, some communication must 
 have passed between them before the next sonnet, 121, 
 was written. This is a sonnet of great moment. 
 Mr. Armitage Brown (1838), who had the delightful 
 
 65 F 
 
MISTRESS FITTON 
 
 privilege of talking over aU these difficulties with 
 Landor, says that it is the one that gave him most 
 trouble, while others have taken it in a terribly matter- 
 of-fact sense. He is, as usual, playing upon words : 
 
 'Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed, 
 When not to be receives reproach of being, 
 And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed, 
 Not by our feeling, but by others' seeing. 
 
 Mr. Brown paraphrases thus : " A man that is slandered 
 is in a worse state than if his enemies spoke the truth ; 
 inasmuch as he does not enjoy those advantages which, 
 according to them, his bad conduct has acquired." 
 But he would have the support of a good conscience, 
 and the qualifying clauses cannot touch that ethical 
 principle. In the first " vile," as well as in the " bad " 
 of the envoi, there is something concealed ; probably 
 " bad "is to be read backwards, otherwise the fourteenth 
 line is pointless and nonsensical. " Vile " is to be taken 
 in the sense of his motto to ' Venus and Adonis ' : 
 " Vilia miretur vulgus" etc. — "let the vulgar admire vile 
 things." Public opinion would think none the worse 
 of Lord Pembroke if he owned the child laid at his 
 door ; but it would esteem him vile if he held aloof 
 The subject is the disputed paternity of the child : 
 that, we shall see, is the only possible meaning of the 
 phrase, " Give salutation to my sportive blood," which 
 dominates the whole sonnet. We should therefore 
 paraphrase : " 'Tis better to be the father than to be 
 esteemed vile, when not to be so receives yet reproach 
 of being, and the just pleasure of paternity is lost — not 
 as we feel it, but as she sees it." That Lord Pembroke 
 was really in that fix follows from the known fact that 
 it was his name which common rumour had joined with 
 that of Mistress Fitton in 1599. After the first four 
 lines the sonnet passes by an ellipsis, marked only by a 
 " for," to Shakespeare himself as charged by some one 
 with the paternity. This idea is scouted : 
 
 66 
 
DOUBTFUL PATERNITY 
 
 For why should others' false adulterate eyes 
 
 Give salutation to my sportive blood ? 
 
 Or on my frailties why are frailer spies. 
 
 Which in their Wills count bad what I think good ? 
 
 No, I am that I am, and they that level 
 
 At my abuses reckon up their own. 
 
 The meaning of these much misunderstood lines must 
 be sought in the remarkable phrase, " Give salutation to 
 my sportive blood." There is only one other instance 
 of it known in literature, and that is also Shakespeare's. 
 The instance cited by Mr. Grant White from Daniel's 
 Civil Wars does not apply strictly, although Shake- 
 speare may have got the hint there of joining " salute " 
 and "blood" in one phrase : it is that of Bolingbroke, 
 afterwards Henry IV., entering London amidst the 
 plaudits of the citizens, the captive king, Richard II., 
 following unregarded ; as he returned the people's 
 salutations, he " felt his blood within salute his state." 
 The real parallel is a scene of 'Henry VIII.,' -which 
 Mr. James Spedding, in his analysis of the dual author- 
 ship, assigns beyond all question to Shakespeare. The 
 words are spoken by Anne Boleyn. She had met the 
 King once, and had danced with him. The Lord 
 Chamberlain is sent to salute her as Marchioness of 
 Pembroke, and on leaving he says, supposed in an 
 aside : 
 
 And who knows yet 
 
 But from this lady may proceed a gem 
 
 To lighten all this isle ? 
 
 Anne murmurs, "This is strange to me," and, when 
 she is at length left at peace by the duenna, continues 
 to cast it in her mind : 
 
 Would I had no being, 
 If this salute my blood a jot ! 
 
 It is the same kind of salutation as in Luke i. 13, and 
 again in verses 28 and 29, the former case being made 
 a jest of by Charmian in ' Antony and Cleopatra,' 1. ii. 
 27, It is the annunciation of parentage to persons of 
 
 67 
 
MISTRESS FITTON 
 
 either sex ; and in S. 121 it is an annunciation of 
 paternity ; which is rejected, because the eyes that 
 make it are those of a false adulterate person, and for 
 other and curious reasons, which could be construed 
 from the profoundly cryptic phraseology if the physio- 
 logical nature of the subject admitted. The envoi is 
 humorous : 
 
 By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown ; 
 Unless this general evil they maintain — 
 All men are bad, and in their badness reign ; 
 
 — jthe double absurdity that " all " may procreate and 
 "all" be father to one child, — "all" monarchs upon 
 one throne. This is doubtless the friendly jest of " the 
 onlie begetter " in the dedication of the Sonnets to Mr. 
 W. H. eight years after (see p. 19, supra). 
 
 In the two next sonnets, 122 and 123, we may 
 discover the real nature of the unkindness, trespass, or 
 tyranny done to Lord Pembroke, which is mentioned 
 first in S. 120. Sonnet 122 is all about a table-book : 
 
 Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain 
 Full character'd with lasting memory. 
 
 Both knew the contents ("thy record ") of this private 
 diary so well that neither had any need to retain it ; 
 Pembroke because he would not miss what he wished 
 to forget, the poet for a sarcastic reason : 
 
 Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score ; 
 Therefore to give them from me was I bold. 
 
 This pocket-book, filled with memoranda, was probably 
 the same that he had given to Herbert as a blank-book 
 in S. 77 ; the entries in it when he got it back would 
 have been such as are referred to in the Rose sonnet, 95, 
 already cited : 
 
 That tongue that tells the story of thy days — 
 (Making lascivious comments on thy sport). 
 
 The poet had given away this diary to a third party, 
 which was a very serious trespass or unkindness. 
 
 68 
 
THE ONLIE BEGETTER 
 
 There was only one person to whom the diary would 
 have been of use just then — namely, Mistress Fitton : 
 in her hands it might be used to strengthen the claim 
 of filiation which she and her relatives made upon Lord 
 Pembroke ; and it may have been by that means that 
 the presumption against him, notwithstanding his denial, 
 was raised so high as to warrant his arrest. At all 
 events, Shakespeare connects his lordship's " Hell of 
 time " with his own tyrannical exercise of some power 
 that he held over him. 
 
 The sonnet on the table-book is followed by one 
 which is the most enigmatic of the series. Ostensibly 
 it is an apostrophe to Time in respect of his essential 
 sameness amidst changing circumstances : the writer 
 professes a philosophic indifference to these new per- 
 formances of an old play, and in so doing contrives to 
 drag in the words "foist," "dates," and "born to our 
 desire." Moreover, he defies Time's registers, which 
 do lie, being " made more or less by thy continual haste." 
 The irony is an ingenious development of the thesis, 
 that one who has had a child laid at his door should 
 not scrutinise the period of his amour too closely : he is 
 the father of the child "more or less" ; if he be not the 
 father of that child, it is all one that he was father of 
 the preceding. Such at least is the poet's own view of the 
 matter. The figure in the second line is anatomical : 
 
 No ! Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change. 
 Thy pyramids built up with newer might 
 To me are nothing novel, nothing strange : 
 They are but dressings of a former sight. 
 Our dates are brief; and therefore we admire 
 What thou dost foist upon us that is old. 
 And rather make them born to our desire 
 Than think that we before have heard them told. 
 Thy registers and thee I both defy. 
 Not wondering at the present nor the past ; 
 For thy records, and what we see, doth lie, 
 Made more or less by thy continual haste. 
 This I do vow, and this shall ever be : 
 I will be true despite thy scythe and thee. 
 69 
 
MISTRESS FITTON 
 
 In the next sonnet, 1 24, the irony rises higher. It 
 is all upon the poor infant, which had perished un- 
 fathered soon after it was born : 
 
 If my dear love were but the child of State, 
 It might for fortune's bastard be unfathered j — 
 
 and so on for twelve lines, his dear love being happily 
 not subject to the disabilities and misfortunes of an 
 accidental offspring. The envoi is a grammatical 
 curiosity : 
 
 To this I witness call the foles [foals] of time, 
 Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime ; 
 
 — which die for the good of those by whose crime they 
 had life. The editors have been unanimous in taking 
 " foles " to be a corruption of the text, most of them 
 reading " fools " — without being any the wiser them- 
 selves. 
 
 Sonnet 125 brings us to the final rupture with Lord 
 Pembroke, and the fall of the curtain. It recalls some 
 great funeral at which Shakespeare had borne the canopy, 
 almost certainly that of Pembroke's father in Salisbury 
 Cathedral in the end of January preceding, to which he 
 had received the honour of an invitation. But even 
 that compliment fails to conciliate him : 
 
 Were 't aught to me I bore the canopy ? 
 
 These obsequies, like those in ' Hamlet,' were but the 
 trappings and the suits of woe, and the formality of 
 them leads him to speak of the mistaken policy of 
 keeping up the pretence of friendship when the reality 
 of it is gone : 
 
 No, let me be obsequious in thy heart, 
 
 and let the burial of friendship be mutual and as 
 thorough on the one side as on the other : 
 
 And take thou my oblation, poor but free. 
 Which is not mix'd with seconds, knows no art ; 
 70 
 
A FRIENDSHIP ENDED 
 
 — the oblation-cakes of unleavened wheat which were 
 laid on the corpse (the corpse of their dead friendship) 
 or were ofFered by a vassal to a lord. He changes 
 suddenly to a fierce and indignant note : 
 
 Hence, thou suborn'd Informer ! a true soul, 
 When most impeacht, stands least in thy control. 
 
 We may dismiss the idea of these being wild and 
 whirling words; every one of them is deliberate, and 
 pertinent to the cause of quarrel. Lord Pembroke 
 had given information, doubtless in the highest quarter, 
 which Shakespeare believed to have impeached himself 
 in the Fitton affair untruly ; and his lordship had been 
 suborned by some one to do so. That he had not done 
 so of his own motion is so far in his favour, the more 
 so that he might have been excused if he had sought to 
 turn the tables for the giving away of his pocket-book. 
 While it is the informer who is underlined for emphasis, 
 it was certainly the suborner who incurred the deepest 
 scorn. But this opens a new chapter of the story, 
 which is pursued under another form than the lyrical 
 of sonnets. 
 
 Coincidently with the release of Lord Pembroke 
 from prison, which was probably at the time when the 
 information impeaching Shakespeare was obtained from 
 him, a sudden change came over the attitude of the 
 Fitton family. For some reason, which was never 
 divulged, they ceased to press the marriage with Lord 
 Pembroke. Before the middle of May Sir Edward 
 Fitton made a " stolen journey " with his daughter 
 into Cheshire, which is thus referred to in a letter from 
 her great-uncle in London to her sister in Warwick- 
 shire : " I suppose your father, by his stolen journey 
 into Cheshire, hath acquainted you with something con- 
 cerning your sister's estate — how true, I know not, for 
 I find halting with me in their courses for her." 
 
 There is a linking sonnet, 127, between the series 
 addressed to Herbert and the shorter series written at 
 
 71 
 
MISTRESS FITTON 
 
 various times to the Dark Lady. It is the old idea of 
 dark features in 'Love's Labour's Lost' and in S. 132, 
 now adapted to the circumstances of her disgrace — her 
 eyes and brows mourning for herself as "slandered 
 with a bastard shame," with "no name" (of a hus- 
 band), " no holy bower " (of marriage), " but is pro- 
 faned" (by idle tongues), "if not lives in disgrace." 
 There is no mistaking the warmth of the sympathy, as 
 well as the deep satire upon those ladies who slander 
 " creation " with a false esteem : 
 
 In the old age black was not counted fair. 
 Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name : 
 But now is black beauty's successive heir. 
 And Beauty slander'd with a bastard shame. 
 For since each hand hath put on Nature's power, 
 Fairing the foul with art's false borrow'd face. 
 Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower. 
 But is profan'd, if not lives in disgrace. 
 Therefore my Mistress' eyes [brows] are raven black. 
 Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem 
 At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack. 
 Slandering Creation with a false esteem. 
 Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe, 
 That every tongue says beauty should look so. 
 
 Before leaving the Sonnets to follow the two prin- 
 cipal themes of them into certain of the plays, I will 
 refer here to two of their incidental subjects, which do 
 not come into any subsequent context. 
 
 The 60th Sonnet brings us to Christmas 1598, or 
 to the New Year 1599; perhaps the occasion in the 
 Calendar which called it forth should be taken as 
 the whole feast of the Nativity, from Christmas Day 
 to the eve of the Epiphany — the rising of the Star. 
 Beginning with four beautiful lines on the spent 
 moments, the sonnet changes abruptly to Nativity, 
 which is treated under astrological figures of speech, 
 but clearly means the Nativity of our Lord : 
 
 72 
 
A CHRISTMAS SONNET 
 
 Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, 
 
 So do our minutes hasten to their end ; 
 
 Each changing place with that which goes before, 
 
 In sequent toil all forwards do contend. 
 
 Nativity, once in the main of light. 
 
 Crawls to maturity ; wherewith being crown'd, 
 
 Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight. 
 
 And Time that gave doth now his gift confound. 
 
 Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth, 
 
 And delves the parallels in beauty's brow. 
 
 Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth. 
 
 And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow. 
 And yet to Time's inhope my verse shall stand. 
 Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand. 
 
 I do not know any place in all his writings where 
 Shakespeare has shown us so much of his mind upon 
 the subject of religious belief. Born only a generation 
 after the Reformation, his father almost certainly con- 
 tinuing a Roman Catholic, and himself brought up 
 among decent Warwickshire folk who still retained 
 their ancestral medieval ways and habits of thought, he 
 saw all around him in his manhood the same phenomenon 
 which has been called in our time the Eclipse of 
 Faith. He was, of course, familiar with the Machia- 
 vellian principles of Marlowe and Kyd among the 
 poets, and of Raleigh among the statesmen, and knew 
 as well how to express them in characters as if they 
 were his own. The modern expansion had brought 
 free thinking as well as adventurous action ; and where 
 there was strictness of belief, it was apt to be that of 
 the sanctimonious pirate who went to sea with the Ten 
 Commandments and struck out one of them (perhaps 
 Sir John Hawkins). What the sonnet expresses is the 
 change from faith and obedience to reason and freedom, 
 " the inevitable movement onward," the devouring 
 tooth of time feeding on " the rarities of nature's 
 truth." 
 
 It is obvious from many places in his writings that 
 Shakespeare treated religious belief with more than 
 formal respect ; and I suspect from his Christmas 
 
 73 
 
MISTRESS FITTON 
 
 sonnet that he would have been conservative of the 
 old forms of worship, perhaps even of the old creeds, 
 which were inevitably crumbling. The statement by a 
 Gloucestershire parson, two generations or more after 
 his death, that " he died a papist " is not incredible. 
 The last lines that he may be supposed to have written, 
 in the Epilogue to 'The Tempest,' are a pious wish 
 of Prospero that he might compose his mind and 
 purge his faults by prayer. Almost literally was he 
 born in medieval England, and in natural piety the 
 child was father of the man. 
 
 Another sonnet, the io6th, shows him in the com- 
 plementary colour of a son of rhodern Europe. This 
 sonnet was a favourite with Charles Lamb, although 
 one rather doubts whether he had analysed its meaning 
 to the bottom : 
 
 When in the chronicle of wasted time 
 I see descriptions of the fairest wights, 
 And beauty making beautiful old rhyme, ' 
 In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights ; 
 Then in the blazon of sweet beauty's best. 
 Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, 
 I see their antique pen would have expressed 
 Even such a beauty as you master now. 
 So all their praises are but prophecies 
 Of this our time, all you prefiguring ; 
 And, for they look'd but with divining eyes. 
 They had not skill enough your worth to sing : 
 For we, which now behold these present days. 
 Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise. 
 
 This comes immediately before the sonnet on the 
 rebellion of Lords Essex and Southampton on the 8 th 
 of February 1601, and may have been written about 
 the beginning of February. The date is that of the 
 funeral of the second Earl of Pembroke in Salisbury 
 Cathedral, at which Shakespeare "bore the canopy." 
 In journeying down to Salisbury, he would have passed 
 through Winchester, where he would have seen the 
 famous Round Table, with the figures of King Arthur 
 
 74 
 
A SONNET AT SALISBURY 
 
 and his knights, bringing to his mind the Orlando 
 Furioso, the Faerie Queene, and the whole literature of 
 chivalry. Proceeding to Salisbury, he would have seen 
 in the Cathedral the recumbent effigies and the brasses 
 of many knights and ladies. The former recalled their 
 ecstatic praises in the chronicle of wasted time ; then, 
 at Salisbury, he found " the blazon," the actual revela- 
 tion of "sweet beauty's best" — the best that sweet 
 beauty could show of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of 
 brow (all pointing to effigies) ; and he was struck by 
 the incongruity between the romance and the reality. 
 He saw that the antique pens would have expressed 
 even such a beauty as that of the young Lord Pembroke 
 himself, who resembled his uncle Sir Philip Sidney, the 
 paragon of the modern world : 
 
 So all their praises are but prophecies 
 Of this our time, all you prefiguring. 
 
 The modern time was more worthy of praise than the 
 olden ; he found more to admire, but less to say : 
 
 For we, which now behold these present days, 
 Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise. 
 
 It was a dexterous compliment, but none the less an 
 honest expression of his admiration for the men and 
 women of his own time, whom he has represented for 
 us in his plays. 
 
 75 
 
BOOK II 
 
 PROSPERO'S STORY OF HIS LIFE 
 
 77 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE REAL PERSONAGES OF ' THE TEMPEST ' : 
 FIRST SERIES 
 
 ' The Tempest ' holds a peculiar place among Shake- 
 speare's plays. Although it was almost certainly his 
 last completed work, it stands first in the Folio ; its 
 text is unusually free from errors, as if it had received 
 his last touches ; and it may be safely assumed that it 
 was found at the top of the pile of papers, or otherwise 
 marked as meant to be the first play in the book. It 
 is, indeed, an Introduction to all the rest, an allegory of 
 the author's life, all that we have from himself in the 
 way of biography.! Every one admits that Prospero is 
 
 1 Some such view of ' The Tempest ' was maintained by an able French 
 critic, M. J^mile MontSgut, Revue des Deux Mondes, ist Aug. 1S65 : "Une 
 Hypothise sur la Tempite de Shakspeare." I quote two passages to show 
 how far he went : " La Templte est trJs ividemment la dernijre pifece de Shak- 
 speare, et n'est autre chose, sous une forme allegorique, que le testament 
 dramatique du grand poEte, ses adieux k ce public fidMe par lequel il avait 
 fait applaudu dans le court espace de vingt-cinq ans" (p. 733). The most 
 particular identification is at p. 7+7 : "Et cependant cette ile ainsi trans- 
 ngurfe par Prospero avait &t€ I'objet de bien des calomnies ; sa fecondite 
 avait iti laie, les enchantemens de son souverain r^voqufe en doute. Shak- 
 speare, dans cette histoire allegorique de sa vie, n'oublie mSme pas les 
 envieux qui le harcelfcrent de leurs d^nigremens et de leurs rancunes. 
 Rappelez-vous la conversation qui ouvre le seconde acte, et les acerbes 
 railleries dont I'lle enchantte est I'objet, de la part de Sebastian et 
 d' Antonio, qnelque George Chapman et quelque John Marston, poussfe 
 par la jalousie et la haine, peut-6tre aussi par les instigations de ce dogue de 
 Ben Jonson, grand poete et caractire antipathique, dont les relations avec 
 Shakspeare, pour le dire 4 sa honte, ne furent jamais pures d'hypocrisie." 
 The sequel will show how differently I identify the personages of that scene ; 
 but M. Mont^gut's general view of 'The Tempest' as "an allegorical 
 history of his lif? " is right, ^ 
 
 79 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 Shakespeare, by reason of the moving speech of the 
 fourth Act in which he takes leave of the stage, begin- 
 ning at the words, " Our revels now are ended." But 
 that is not the end of the play. In the last Act he 
 settles scores with " all mine enemies," who had been 
 put on board a ship and wrecked upon his island so 
 that they might attend that audit ; having forgiven 
 them, with varying degrees of cordiality, he will retire 
 him " to my Milan, where every third thought shall be 
 my grave," to end his days at peace with the world, and 
 in composing his mind by prayer. 
 
 The ship which is to carry them all from the island 
 is lying in a creek ready to sail, as the boatswain 
 reports : 
 
 Tight and yare and bravely rigg'd as when 
 
 We first put out to sea. 
 
 But Prospero decides that she shall not sail until the 
 morning, so that he may offer the hospitality of his 
 cave for one night to his quondam enemies, promising 
 to make a part of it go quick away with discourse of 
 " the story of my life." Alonso accepts the invitation, 
 saying, 
 
 I long 
 
 To hear the story of your life, which must 
 
 Take the ear strangely. 
 
 And Prospero answers, " I'll deliver all." 
 
 The story of Prospero's life, which all the world has 
 been longing to hear for two centuries, and will long to 
 hear only the more as time runs on, was told ostensibly 
 behind the scenes, in that cave of the island. But 
 that is only the Shakespearian irony. It is the same 
 irony that he had used once before in his other great 
 enigmatic play of 'Hamlet,' where Horatio, having 
 remained in life by Hamlet's wish, " to tell my story," 
 announces the heads of the revelation that he has to 
 make, and bids " the yet unknowing world " assemble 
 in the market-place of Elsinore to hear it, ending with 
 
 80 
 
PROSPERO'S ENEMIES 
 
 nearly the same phrase as Prosper o's, " All this can I 
 truly deliver." 
 
 In the enigma of Hamlet, as in the parable of 
 Prospero, we shall find the promised revelation in the 
 play itself — there or nowhere. 'The Tempest' con- 
 tains the story of Prospero's life : of the groans of his 
 spirit Ariel imprisoned for twelve years in a cloven pine 
 by the spells of the foul witch Sycorax ; of that distant 
 period, "in the dark backward and abysm of time," 
 when Miranda could just remember that she was attended 
 by four or five women ; of his deposition and banish- 
 ment from his dukedom ; of the taming of CaUban ; 
 and of much more in the form of parable. Among 
 other things, we learn that his greatest enemy was his 
 treacherous brother Antonio ; that Alonso, King of 
 Naples, was Antonio's agent in depriving Prospero of 
 his dukedom ; that an honest old counsellor, Gonzalo, 
 was Prospero's best friend in his misfortune ; that 
 Antonio, having succeeded in one usurpation, tried 
 another, in tempting Sebastian to murder his brother 
 and seize the crown of Naples ; that Alonso had a 
 drunken butler, Stephano, as well as a jester, Trinculo, 
 in his train ; that Trinculo was at one time the " good 
 friend " of Stephano and another time beaten by him ; 
 and that both of them were included by Prospero 
 among " all mine enemies," and made to settle accounts 
 with him in a manner proper to their inferior station. 
 
 Prospero being Shakespeare, as all agree, who are 
 Prospero's enemies ? It will not do to make the one 
 real and the others imaginary. The object of these 
 chapters is to prove that we are given in the text of the 
 play various witty marks of identity by which all the 
 five "enemies" — the three princes and their two humble 
 followers — can be recognised, as well as the three lords 
 in attendance and the master and boatswain of the 
 ship. In like manner the allegorical parts of Miranda, 
 Ariel, Caliban, and Sycorax become intelligible after the 
 key has been found to the real persons. For convenience 
 
 8r G 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 I shall state at the outset what I believe to be the reading 
 of the parable : 
 
 Dramatis Persons 
 
 Prospero, the right Duke of Milan 
 Antonio, his usurping brother . 
 Alonso, King of Naples . 
 Sebastian .... 
 
 GoNZALO, an honest old counsellor 
 
 Adrian, a lord 
 
 Francisco, a lord 
 
 Stephano, a drunken butler 
 
 Trinculo, a jester . 
 
 Boatswain 
 
 Master .... 
 
 Ferdinand, heir to Naples 
 
 Miranda, daughter to Prospero 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 Lord Southampton. 
 Lord Pembroke. 
 Deceased Earl of 
 
 Essex. 
 Fulke Greville. 
 Sir William Knollys. 
 Sir Francis Bacon. 
 Ben Jonson. 
 John Marston. 
 Thomas Heywood. 
 Samuel Daniel. 
 Invented as heir to 
 
 Pembroke. 
 Shakespeare's Works 
 
 — the prospective 
 
 Folio of 1623. 
 
 Three objections to this extensive scheme of identi- 
 fication will arise on the threshold, which I shall deal 
 with at once so as to get the better credence for the 
 positive proofs. They are, firstly, that the play has 
 been popular and intelligible without any key to it ; 
 secondly, that it would have been hazardous for Shake- 
 speare to have settled accounts with his real enemies in 
 a stage-play, supposing their identities recognised when 
 it was produced at Court in 1611 or 1613; and 
 thirdly, that there is neither contemporary evidence nor 
 tradition that real persons were recognised in any of 
 the characters. 
 
 (i) 'The Tempest' is a good acting play without 
 any key to its characters, excepting, perhaps, the identi- 
 fication of Prospero with the great dramatist himself. 
 It has been revived time after time since the Restoration, 
 and has always been popular, being said, indeed, to be 
 the most popular of the comedies with the possible 
 exception of ' The Merchant of Venice.' It is a charm- 
 ing fantasy of the same kind as ' Midsummer Night's 
 
 82 
 
OBSCURE SCENES OF THE PLAY 
 
 Dream,' with the august figure of the great magician 
 moving through it all. Farther, the idyll of Ferdinand 
 and Miranda is sufficient plot in itself, and has been 
 sometimes extracted as the real story of ' The Tempest.' 
 Caliban is a quaint monster, while Stephano and Trinculo, 
 in company with him, are good fun, even if we take them, 
 as some not careful critics have done, for a couple of 
 drunken " sailors." That the play should be a success 
 in virtue of those scenes proves what a clever playwright 
 Shakespeare was. Nearly all the rest, excepting the 
 opening wreck scene, is obscure, tedious, apt to be cut 
 down in the acting. There are whole scenes, extending 
 to hundreds of lines, which clearly mean something, 
 inasmuch as the language is pointed and the action 
 vigorous, but yet are tedious to read and hard to act 
 because the object of them is obscure and the wit 
 difficult. In his long narrative to Miranda, Prospero 
 is well aware that he is involved and prolix in relating 
 how he lost his dukedom, for he stops three times to 
 ask whether she is listening. Next comes another 
 long reminiscent scene with Ariel, upon which nothing 
 turns in the subsequent action, excepting that the 
 island was Caliban's inheritance from his dam Sycorax. 
 The first long scene with the three shipwrecked princes 
 and their attendant lords is evidently witty ; but there is 
 not a commentator who can interpret the wit of the 
 wager about the old cock and the cockerel, of widow 
 Dido, of the four-times-mentioned fact that their garments 
 had not been stained by salt water, of the ground being 
 tawny with an eye of green in it. The plot between 
 Antonio and Sebastian, to murder Alonso and seize the 
 crown of Naples, with the incidental references to 
 Claribel as the next heir supposing Ferdinand drowned, 
 has nothing to do with the action of the play, and 
 comes to an abortive end. The device of the Shapes, 
 who bring in a feast, and of Ariel as a harpy swooping 
 down and devouring it, is obscurity itself beside its 
 contrasting device, the betrothal-masque of Iris, Ceres, 
 
 83 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 and Juno, and the dance of reapers, which is as clear as 
 the sunlight and exquisite as the rainbow. The scene 
 in the last Act, with a clothes-line across the stage hung 
 with glistering apparel for Stephano and Trinculo to 
 steal, is adhered to as an ancient tradition and out of 
 respect to the author's great name ; but it would not be 
 tolerated in a modern pantomime. Yet with the key 
 it becomes the climax of the wit. 
 
 (2) Is it likely that, in a comedy which appears to 
 have been played originally before the Court, and 
 probably written with that view, the author would have 
 incurred the almost certain risk of having real persons 
 detected under his characters ? In the first place, it 
 does not follow that the boldest and most hazardous 
 part of the allegory, the exhibition of the Essex con- 
 spiracy with Lord Southampton's part in it, was in the 
 play originally, or before it was first printed in 1623 ; 
 the whole of that episode, which does not concern the 
 main action, might easily have been introduced in 
 preparing the copy for the press. The pointed hit at Sir 
 Francis Bacon, as " this lord of weak remembrance," in 
 respect of turning his back upon his old benefactor, 
 Essex, in the memorable State Trial of 1601, would 
 have been unwelcome to none but Bacon himself. The 
 characterisation of Lord KnoUys as Adrian is amusing 
 and not malicious. Fulke Greville, as the honest old 
 counsellor Gonzalo, is depicted with a warmth of 
 admiration that any one would have been proud to merit 
 at Shakespeare's hands, that no one else upon his stage 
 has ever obtained. So far as concerns Lord Pembroke, 
 who was Lord Chamberlain in 161 6, and the most 
 wholesome influence in King James's Court, his part as 
 Alonso is hardly inferior to that of Prospero himself in 
 grave and noble bearing. The memory of Essex, as 
 Sebastian, is treated justly and with obvious tenderness 
 and affection. The merciless exhibition of Ben Jonson, 
 as Pembroke's drunken butler, and of Marston in his 
 changing relations with Jonson, was such a retaliation 
 
 84 
 
OBJECTIONS ANSWERED 
 
 for an old envenomed attack as Shakespeare was safe to 
 make. Jonson himself took his punishment sensibly 
 (as Drummond assures us he always did), making no 
 other reply than a growl at " Tempests " and " a servant- 
 monster" (Stephano's favourite way of addressing 
 Caliban) in the induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614). 
 By the time that ' The Tempest ' was printed, Shake- 
 speare had been dead seven years, and the memory of 
 rivalries, conflicts, and hatreds hallowed in his grave. 
 Jonson himself wrote the great appreciation to prefix to 
 the folio, strictly just and not ungenerous. He could 
 well afford to be magnanimous, for he was wearing 
 the Laurel Crown which his rival could never gain, 
 although it was his deepest ambition to possess it. 
 Lastly, King James himself could have found nothing 
 in ' The Tempest ' to object to. One passage in it, near 
 the beginning, appears to be a direct appeal to the King 
 to rectify the unfairness with which Shakespeare had 
 been treated in the withholding of public honour : 
 
 And by my prescience 
 I find my zenith doth depend upon 
 A most auspicious star, whose influence 
 If now I court not but omit, my fortunes 
 Will ever after droop. Here cease more questions. 
 
 (3) There is nothing recorded at the time, nor 
 handed down by tradition, to show that real persons 
 were recognised in the dramatis persona. The one 
 possible exception is the above reference in the induction 
 to Bartholomew Fair. But of the play itself there is 
 hardly any mention ; it is included twice in the Revels 
 Accounts as having been played at Court ; but it 
 is not clear that it was ever performed upon a public 
 stage when it was nsYf. It became known best after 
 the Restoration, and then it was treated by Davenant 
 and Dryden in a way that can only be called stupid, 
 whether we see a parable in it or not. The absolute 
 break in the continuity of tradition is shown con- 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 clusively by one signal instance. Ventriloquism, as 
 will be shown later, is essential in the scene where 
 Trinculo (a metathesis of Ventriloc, taken from Rabelais) 
 is made to give the lie twice to Caliban, and again to 
 Stephano, who beats him, the voice having really been 
 thrown by Ariel from behind the scenes into the belly 
 of Trinculo. Yet that obvious artifice is unknown to 
 the present age in the staging of ' The Tempest,' and 
 is not even hinted at by a single commentator. When 
 such a tradition as that has failed, and has never been 
 rediscovered, who shall say that many other witty 
 things in the comedy have not been missed also? The 
 joke of the new-coined name Trinculo, as a rearrange- 
 ment of the letters of Ventriloc {u and v being the same 
 letter and e omitted), does not appear to have been 
 understood at the time ; for the name was copied, but 
 misspelt Trincalo (which spoils the metathesis) in the 
 play Albumazar, acted before the King on 9th March 
 161 5, in the Hall of Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 
 GONZALO, FULKE GrEVILLE 
 
 In working out this problem of concealed wit, let 
 the reader try the same method as the writer did when 
 he had not even an inkling of the general purport of 
 the play. Let him begin with the part of Gonzalo. 
 Next to Prospero, he is the person whom one suspects 
 most to have been drawn from the life. In the list of 
 dramatis persona which Shakespeare wrote out on the 
 fly-leaf at the end, he is marked specially as "an honest 
 old counsellor." Prospero speaks with such real feeling 
 of his goodness to himself, in telling Miranda the 
 circumstances of his deposition from the dukedom, that 
 the ingenuous girl exclaims : 
 
 Would I might 
 But ever see that man ! 
 
 In the last Act, when he is contemplating the spell- 
 
 86 
 
FULKE GREVILLE 
 
 bound circle of princes and attendant lords, and running 
 them over in his mind, his eye rests with unfeigned 
 happiness upon " holy Gonzalo." No other man in all 
 Shakespeare is ever called " holy," unless an anointed 
 king or a consecrated priest. 
 
 Holy Gonzalo, honourable man, 
 
 Mine eyes, even sociable to the show of thine, 
 
 Fall fellowly drops. . . . 
 
 O good Gonzalo, 
 My true preserver, and a loyal sir 
 To him thou foUow'st ! I will pay thy graces 
 Home both in word and deed. 
 
 When the spell is ofF the circle, he addresses them 
 one by one, beginning with Gonzalo : 
 
 First, noble friend. 
 Let me embrace thine age, whose honour cannot 
 Be measured or confined. 
 
 Who can this be among the statesmen and courtiers 
 of Elizabeth and James ? Let the reader do as the 
 writer did : let him run over all the prominent names, 
 turning the leaves of the second and third volumes of 
 Lodge's Portraits, and following up others which are not 
 there. There is none so fit as Fulke Greville. He 
 served Elizabeth at Court for twenty-five years, and 
 continued his service under James, never a favourite, 
 but never in disgrace. Camden wrote of him : 
 " He did so entirely devote himself to the study of 
 real Virtue and Honour, that the nobleness of his mind 
 far exceeded that of his birth." He never married, 
 but, according to Anthony Wood, "he lived and 
 died a constant courtier of the ladies." He was 
 the squire of Beauchamp Court and lord of the 
 manor of Aulcester, near Stratford-on-Avon, in which 
 town he was seen often on the business of his estate. 
 He wodd naturally have felt some pride in the 
 Warwickshire genius who had made a name for himself 
 in London, all the more that -poetry and philosophy 
 
 87 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 were his own foibles. His town house as late as the 
 year 1607 was in the Austin Friars. In the latter 
 part of the reign of James he built for himself a 
 mansion in Holborn, nearly opposite to Staple Inn, 
 which became Brooke House when he was created 
 Lord Brooke ; the site of it is commemorated by 
 Brooke Street and Greville Street, with Beauchamp 
 Street, which bound the Prudential Assurance Office. 
 James made him custodian of Warwick Castle, which 
 passed into his possession, and continues the residence 
 of his collateral descendants. 
 
 Supposing Fulke Greville to have been the original 
 of Gonzalo, the true friend and preserver of Prospero, 
 it is remarkable that there is hardly a trace remaining 
 of his services to Shakespeare, There is only one 
 such, which has not been noticed hitherto, and may 
 be denied by the sticklers for documentary proof. It 
 is in the matter of Shakespeare's famous coat-of-arms, 
 which now blazons the covers and fly-leaves of new 
 editions. Application for a grant of coat-armour was 
 made first to the Heralds' College in 1596. A draft 
 of the grant, addressed " to all and singul noble and 
 gentillmen of what estate or degre bearing arms these 
 presentes shall come," was made out by William 
 Dethick, alias Garter, principal King -of- Arms, on 
 20th October 1596 ; but the draft was not executed. 
 In 1599 a new draft was written out, without date, 
 which is in the name of William Dethick, Garter, 
 Principall King -of- Arms of England, and William 
 Camden alias Clarencieulx, King-of-Arms for the sowth 
 east and weste partes of this realme. This application 
 appears to have been successful, the arms having been 
 assumed. At the second attempt the matter lay with 
 Camden. He had been appointed Clarencieux in 1597 ; 
 and it is known that he got the office through the influ- 
 ence of Fulke Greville, who would doubtless have been 
 willing also to use his influence with his nominee, and 
 his authority as a Warwickshire squire, to cover over 
 
 88 
 
THE TREASURER OF THE NAVY 
 
 the undoubted defects in Shakespeare's pedigree of 
 gentility. The coat-of-arms was a consolation prize to 
 Shakespeare for his recent loss of the poet-laureateship, 
 which would have made him a gentleman by virtue of 
 the office. 
 
 Turning now to ' The Tempest,' we jfind Gonzalo 
 the chief talker, and the chief subject of talk, in the 
 first scene with the princes and lords after they had 
 come ashore from the wreck. Gonzalo's reiterated 
 theme (which Ariel had already brought to the notice 
 of Prospero) is the marvellous escape of their clothes 
 from the stain of salt water : 
 
 Gonzalo. That our garments, being, as they were, drenched in 
 the sea, hold notwithstanding their freshness and glosses, being 
 rather new-dyed than stained with salt water. 
 
 Antonio. If but one of his pockets could speak, would it not say 
 he lies ? 
 
 Sebastian. Ay, or very falsely pocket up his report. 
 
 Antonio and Sebastian exchange these remarks in an 
 aside as if not heeding Gonzalo. When the interrup- 
 tion is over, Gonzalo repeats the curious fact about 
 their garments ; whereupon more discursive talk, and 
 then Gonzalo's third attempt, "Sir, we were talking 
 that our garments," etc. The insinuation of Antonio, 
 that one of Gonzalo's pockets would give the lie to 
 this reiterated statement if it could speak, haS some 
 covert meaning, first because of "pockets," and 
 secondly because of one of his pockets. Fulke Greville 
 was Treasurer of the Navy; he had been also Secretary 
 to the Council of the Marches of Wales, in which 
 office he had certain fixed perquisites for himself (Cal 
 State Papers). He had, as it were, two pockets; 
 and Antonio msmuates that one of them was stained 
 with salt water, or that his pocket as treasurer of 
 marine causes was not clean. The insinuation is in 
 keeping with Antonio's character throughout, which 
 IS that of a man who does not believe in human 
 
 89 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST* 
 
 goodness.^ Sebastian's rejoinder, " Ay, or very falsely 
 pocket up his report," may be the plea of Lord Essex, 
 that important depositions by the witnesses to his con- 
 spiracy (of whom Fulke Greville was one) were pocketed 
 up at the State Trial, so to enable Coke and Bacon to 
 prove a long- premeditated conspiracy. Antonio, as 
 Southampton, might be expected to know something 
 of the naval treasurer's pocket, for he was a vice- 
 admiral, and was sometimes out of pocket in consider- 
 able sums disbursed by him for the upkeep of forts, 
 etc., under his command in the Channel (State Papers). 
 
 Francisco, Sir Francis Bacon 
 
 The two other lords are Francisco and Adrian. 
 Francisco speaks just twice — the second time to say 
 three words, the first time to describe in stately 
 verse how he saw Ferdinand battling with the waves, 
 and to express his belief that he had escaped drowning. 
 This question of the survivorship of the heir to Naples 
 is a matter of the first importance to Antonio, when 
 he seeks to persuade Sebastian to murder his brother 
 and seize the crown. Accordingly he discredits Fran- 
 cisco's professed belief, assigning his reasons : 
 
 Ant. Although this lord of weak remembrance, this 
 Who shall be of as little memory 
 When he is earth'd, hath here almost persuaded — 
 For he's a spirit of persuasion, only 
 Professes to persuade — the king his son's alive, 
 'Tis as impossible that he's undrown'd 
 As he that sleeps here swims. 
 
 1 Greville did not escape charges of peculation. In the Sidney Letters 
 (ed. Collins, 1746) it is stated under date 13th December 1595 ; "There is a 
 complaint come to the Lords against Mr. Foulk Grivell for some abuses in 
 Kanck Wood, and an information of £14,000 spoil, by good certificate of 
 gentlemen dwelling thereabouts. It will grow hardly with him. The 
 matter is referred to my Lord Treasurer and Sir John Fortescue." This 
 appears to have been some matter of felling timber on Crown lands in 
 Warwickshire. On 24th June 1597 he was granted the rangership of 
 Wedgknock Park, Co. Warwick, with certain fees or dues which are stated. 
 
 90 
 
AN HISTORICAL PHRASE 
 
 Seb. I ^i^ve no hope 
 
 That he's undrown'd. 
 
 j„t, O, out of that " no hope, 
 
 What great hope have you ! no hope that way is 
 Another way so high a hope, that even 
 Ambition cannot pierce a wink beyond, etc. 
 
 Antonio's " Out of that ' no hope ' " is a historical 
 phrase. On the afternoon of Sunday, the 8 th of 
 February 1601, there were important doings at Essex 
 House, in the Strand. In the morning, about eight 
 o'clock, the Queen had sent the Lord Keeper Egerton, 
 the Lord Chief Justice Popham, the Earl of Worcester, 
 and Sir William KnoUys, Comptroller of the House- 
 hold (who was uncle to Essex), to demand an ex- 
 planation from his lordship of the assembling of his 
 followers and other mysterious preparations. The 
 deputation, bearing the Great Seal, were made prisoners 
 in Essex House by the bold advice of one or more 
 of the conspirators. Meanwhile, Essex rode into 
 the City, in the hope of rallying the citizens around 
 him, wherein he failed absolutely. He returned by 
 water to his house, which was then put in a state of 
 defence. Towards dusk, about six o'clock, a body of 
 troops under the Lord Admiral, with Sir Robert Sidney, 
 Fulke Greville, and others as captains, effected a landing 
 from the river in the garden of Essex House. They 
 approached the walls and summoned a parley by beat 
 of drum. The Lord Admiral put forward Sidney as 
 spokesman on their side, while Lord Southampton came 
 out upon the leads to answer for the Essex faction. 
 The parley which followed became famous, having been 
 reproduced verbatim, as if reporters had been present. 
 Two extant versions of it agree as to the substance and 
 order of the speeches, differing only a little in the 
 words. One of these was printed from a MS. in the 
 hand of Frances Bourchier, in the possession of Sir 
 Bourchier Wrey, by Lingard in an appendix to vol vi. 
 of his History, where it may be read conveniently. 
 
 91 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 The other, which alone contains the " no hope " 
 sentence, is a manuscript in handwriting of the time, 
 extending to eight closely -written folio pages, and 
 entitled " The Earle of Essex his rebellione, with the 
 speache of him and of the Earle of South, upon the 
 leads before they yealded themselves, and the speaches 
 of the Lo. Keeper and Mr. Secretarie in the Star 
 Chamber touching ye same." This manuscript was 
 acquired for the Egerton Collection (2606) of the 
 British Museum at the Ouvry sale in 1882. A care- 
 less or not very exact modern copy of the same version, 
 formerly in the possession of Joseph Hunter, and now 
 in the Museum, is described as having been made 
 " from a contemporary Manuscript in the collection of 
 Mr. Wilson." Near the top of the second folio 
 recto (in the original MS.) we come to that part of 
 the parley which is of greatest interest : " Sydney. 
 By standing out there is noe hope, but by yealdinge 
 there is some hope afforded you. South. Well, cosen, 
 that hope is soe little that without hostages wee will 
 rather make choice of this noe hope then of that hope. 
 And at these words came the E. of Essex to South, 
 and said to Sir Robt. and the people : Good brother 
 Sydney and you my lovinge countrymen," etc., pro- 
 testing that his enemies at Court were the sole object 
 of his stand, complaining of their secret methods, and 
 declaring that his purpose was the " rooting out of 
 such atheists and caterpillers from the earth" — 
 meaning Raleigh and his adherents. Southampton's 
 phrase "rather this noe hope than that hope" was 
 epigrammatic enough to be in all men's mouths in 
 the exciting days following, the more so that it would 
 have recalled a famous line of Virgil : 
 
 Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem. 
 
 It reappears in the mouth of Antonio in 'The 
 Tempest,' " O, out of that ' no hope,' what great hope 
 have you " ; and upon that singular coincidence alone 
 
 92 
 
SIR FRANCIS BACON 
 
 one is led to suspect that Antonio is meant for Lord 
 Southampton. 
 
 But to return to Francisco as Francis Bacon. Essex 
 and Southampton were both tried before their peers on 
 a charge of treason. Coke, the Attorney-General, led 
 the case for the Crown ; but Bacon, although not then 
 one of the law officers, was also retained for it (he said 
 by the Queen's command) and handsomely feed. His 
 appearance against Essex, his old benefactor and con- 
 fidant, together with his pressing of the charge, was 
 resented by public opinion so strongly that he found 
 it necessary to justify himself, which he did in 1604 by 
 an open letter to Lord Mountjoy, an old friend to 
 Essex, and now married to his sister. Lady Rich. This 
 Apologie contains many matters of interest concerning 
 Bacon's intimacy with Essex, as well as the duties 
 or commands that the Queen laid upon him. He 
 recalls how Essex used to receive his advice about the 
 Irish campaign. Having stated the pros and contras, 
 he would deliver some kind of opinion, whereupon 
 Essex " would tell me. That opinion came not from my 
 mind hut from my robe." What is this but Francisco's 
 character } 
 
 For he's a spirit of persuasion, only 
 Professes to persuade, — 
 
 a characteristic which pertains nowhere to Francisco 
 in the play, and must have been true of the original 
 public personage for whom he stood. Again, he is 
 called " this lord of weak remembrance," although there 
 is nothing in the play to base that trait upon. To 
 explain it, the commentators assume that he was old and 
 in his dotage; but there is no hint of that, while 
 'I weak remembrance " is meant rather as a constitu- 
 tional peculiarity than as a common infirmity. It was 
 a well-known failing of Francis Bacon, which was 
 never more dramatically placed before the world than 
 at the trial of Essex by his peers. Bacon having 
 
 93 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 pressed the case against Lord Essex by a garbled state- 
 ment, the accused, on recovering from the shock to 
 his generous mind inflicted by the cool effrontery of 
 this lawyer but lately his friend and confidant, hotly 
 challenged him to put off his gown and submit to 
 examination as a witness to fact. Bacon's Afohgie 
 three years after did not show any better memory for 
 facts. As it was printed, it could be scanned by Essex's 
 troops of friends, so that we may assume the judgment 
 passed upon it at the time to have been the same in 
 effect that has been pronounced by Dr. E. A. Abbot 
 in his valuable monograph Bacon and Essex, 1877. 
 Bacon is convicted out of his own extant letters to have 
 advised Essex to undertake the command in Ireland 
 (which was his ruin) by certain arguments and pre- 
 cedents, which he turned so ingeniously in his 
 Apologie that they are made to appear dissuasives. 
 As Dr. Abbot is scrupulously fair, I cite his explanation 
 of this moral phenomenon : it will be seen that he puts 
 it down to something like " weak remembrance." " The 
 fact was, that Bacon was one of the most inaccurate of 
 men. ' De minimis non curat lex,' said King James of 
 him ; and the saying is true alike of his philosophical and 
 his political works. Partly through this habitual inaccu- 
 racy and partly through a strong sense of the effective 
 way of putting things, Bacon appears to me more often 
 to have unconsciously erred than consciously, in colour- 
 ing facts to suit his purpose. He had an instinctive 
 bias towards convenient statements, and an uncon- 
 scious antipathy for inconvenient truth" (p. 182, note). 
 A more damaging charge could not be brought in 
 blander terms. It leads directly, as if Dr. Abbot were 
 actually commenting upon this passage in ' The Tem- 
 pest,' to Shakespeare's own prophecy concerning the 
 oblivion that would overtake Francisco's memory : 
 
 This lord of weak remembrance, this 
 Who shall be of as little memory 
 When he is earth'd. 
 
 94 
 
SHAKESPEARE ON BACON 
 
 This is spoken by Antonio of Francisco ; but there is 
 no reason in the play why Antonio should prophesy a 
 merited oblivion to Francisco, who is the lord in attend- 
 ance upon himself, nor any reason in the play why 
 Francisco's memory should or should not " outlive his 
 life half a year." The remark falls entirely outside 
 the action and characterisation ; it has a meaning for the 
 author alone, and it is his personal judgment upon the 
 fame of Francis Bacon. It arises out of the word-play 
 of memory in two senses, the train of thought being 
 that a man whose own memory is short ought not to 
 live long in the memories of others. But an easy 
 memory in this case meant an easy conscience, so that 
 the prophecy of oblivion is rather a righteous judg- 
 ment upon conduct (in the manner of the Psalter) than 
 a critical judgment upon intellectual achievements. 
 Shakespeare in 1611 was not in a position to pro- 
 nounce upon the latter, as the philosophical writings 
 upon which Bacon's fame rests were all written after 
 that date, excepting the essay on the Advancement of 
 Learning (1605). It is therefore beside the ques- 
 tion to consider farther why his prophecy seems to be 
 so wide of the mark. The second time that Francisco 
 opens his mouth it is to say just three words, which 
 pass as commonplace, calling for no remark from any 
 commentator. In Act III. Scene iii. — 
 
 Enter Prospero above, invisible. Enter several strange Shapes, 
 bringing in a banquet ; they dance about it vtdth gentle actions of 
 salutation ; and, inviting the king, etc., to eat, they depart. 
 
 Such is the original stage direction, to which some clever 
 device had corresponded. The three princes are lost 
 in admiration of the "living droUerie," and all pass 
 remarks upon it ; Gonzalo also pays the Shapes a fine 
 tribute. Francisco has been observing them in silence, 
 and at their departure he is constrained to exclaim : 
 "They vanished strangely." By which admission 
 drawn from Francisco Shakespeare meant Sir Francis 
 
 95 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 to express admiration, if not envy, of his stage devices. 
 Bacon was not only, as all the world knows, a warm 
 admirer of the mechanical arts and a great believer in 
 their future, but he was also an amateur of masques 
 and devices, and sometimes took a hand in getting them 
 up. A curious question arises about one of these, per- 
 formed before the Queen in the tiltyard at Whitehall 
 on 17th November 1595, whether, namely, Bacon and 
 Shakespeare were not both consulted by Lord Essex in 
 the preparation of it. The account given in the Sidney 
 Letters, 22nd November, shows that the parts actually 
 spoken corresponded with the speeches which are extant 
 in Bacon's handwriting. But there is another part of 
 the same Philautia device, of a more picturesque 
 and poetic quality, preserved among the Essex papers 
 in the handwriting of his lordship's secretary, Edward 
 Reynolds. It was intended that the Squire should pre- 
 sent to the goddess Philautia two Indians from the 
 Amazon — the blind son of an Indian prince and his 
 attendant. The attendant makes a speech full of con- 
 ceits about the blindness of love, and bringing in, 
 among other things, the same idea as in ' Troilus and 
 Cressida ' (also found in Willobie his Aviso) : 
 
 For to be wise, and love 
 Exceeds man's might ; that dwells with gods above ; 
 
 — the words in the speech being : " And, to conclude, 
 your Majesty may be invested of that which the poet 
 saith was never granted, Amare et sapere." All this 
 may have been Essex's own (the whole Philautia 
 device passed as his, including Bacon's speeches) ; but 
 the Indian part contains a remarkable sonnet, the oracle 
 spoken from one of " the holiest vaults " of a temple 
 in the Indies, whither the father of the blind prince had 
 gone in search of a cure for his son : 
 
 Seated between the old world and the new 
 A land there is no other land may touch. 
 Where reigns a Queen in peace and honour true : 
 Stories or fables do describe no such. 
 96 
 
BACON THE AUTHOR OF A DEVICE 
 
 Never did Atlas such a burthen bear 
 As she in holding up the world oppress'd, 
 Supplying with her virtue everywhere 
 Weakness of friends, errors of servants, best. 
 No nation breeds a warmer blood for war, 
 And yet she calms them with her majesty. 
 No age hath ever wit refined so far. 
 And yet she calms them by her policy. 
 To her thy son must make his sacrifice. 
 If he will have the morning of his eyes. 
 
 In obedience to this oracle the blind prince and his 
 conductor had arrived at the Court of the English 
 queen, and the miracle of his restoration to sight was 
 there and then to be performed. It is impossible to be 
 sure that Essex had got some one to write that sonnet 
 for him, with the poetic action in which' it is set ; but 
 it is a curious coincidence that in ' Love's Labour's 
 Lost' there is ascribed to Rosaline just the converse of 
 the effect, " the morning of his eyes," upon another 
 " rude and savage man of Inde " : 
 
 Who sees the heavenm Rosaline, 
 That, like a rude and savage man of Inde, 
 
 At the first opening of the gorgeous east. 
 Bows not his vassal head, and strucken blind 
 
 Kisses the base ground with obedient breast ? 
 
 Let us indulge the fancy, at least, that on one occa- 
 sion, in the year 1595, Shakespeare and Bacon severally 
 sent in suggestions for Essex's device before the Queen, 
 and that Bacon's alone were used. The Queen did not 
 care for the device ; after listening to part of it, she 
 remarked, " If she had thought there had been so much 
 said of her she would not have been there that night, 
 and so went to bed " (Sidney Letters).^ 
 
 1 Spedding calls the part of the Essex device among the State Papers « a 
 device which has no apparent connection with the other." But both are 
 obviously parts of the same Philautia scheme, although by different hands - 
 the same esquire who spoke what Bacon wrote for him (as in the MS at 
 Lambeth) was meant also to have introduced the bUnd Indian and his 
 guide, whose speech, with the sonnet embedded in it, is quite different in 
 manner from those of the hermit, the secretary, the soldier, and the esquire. 
 Tlie earher part of the device having occupied so much time, it is probable 
 
 97 H 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF ' THE TEMPEST ' 
 
 Adrian, Sir William Knollys 
 
 The other of the three lords in the play is Adrian. 
 He is characterised by dialogues at much greater length 
 than Francisco, and by dialogues which seem to have 
 no other object than to characterise him ; and yet his 
 identity is more difficult than Francisco's, and much 
 more difficult than Gonzalo's. It seems as if Shake- 
 speare were not unwilling to make it known that 
 Gonzalo, an honest old counsellor, an honourable man, 
 a loyal sir, the one layman in all his plays who is 
 distinguished as " holy," was meant for Fulke Greville ; 
 that he was at no pains to conceal the identity of 
 Francisco with Sir Francis Bacon ; but that he used all 
 his wit to characterise Adrian and yet to make it 
 difficult to guess who he was. He is in attendance 
 upon Prince Sebastian, who, we shall see, is the deceased 
 Lord Essex. There are three conversations in which 
 he is given a prominent part. In the first, Antonio, 
 who is Southampton (known for his addiction to wager- 
 ing upon tennis -matches and the like), lays a wager 
 aside with Sebastian as to whether Gonzalo or Adrian 
 " first begins to crow." Sebastian backs " the old 
 cock," Antonio "the cockerel," the wager being "a 
 laughter." It happens that Adrian is the first to break 
 silence, whereupon Sebastian laughs (" let him laugh 
 that wins "), and Antpmio, having lost, smartly exclaims, 
 " So : you're paid," ^hat is, paid by your own in- 
 advertent laughter. The text of the folio is quite 
 clear, and is careful even to the punctuation. But the 
 editors, knowing that Gonzalo is described as " an 
 honest old counsellor," and assuming that he is " the 
 old cock," have felt constrained to amend it, some in 
 one way, some in another, so as to make Antonio the 
 winner of the wager. It is impossible to make Antonio 
 
 that the Indian part was omitted, although it is the more poetical and 
 would have been less tedious. The compliment to Elizabeth in the sonnet 
 has the merit of being true, and would have been well received. 
 
 98 
 
SIR WILLIAM KNOLLYS 
 
 the winner without taking a series of liberties with the 
 text. The meaning, and indeed the very purpose, of the 
 incident is to bring out the fact that, although Gonzalo 
 is old, Adrian is older ; Gonzalo being indeed a mere 
 chicken to him. Adrian is " the old cock," although 
 neither the reader would suspect it nor those who saw 
 Adrian in the flesh. He was an old man who looked 
 young for his years; he was also of "suppler joints" than 
 Gonzalo (III. iii. 109), suppler in more senses than one ; 
 he was an old courtier, in good preservation, who had 
 kept his place under as many trials as the vicar of 
 Bray. He is also pedantic in his language and vain of 
 his knowledge. Thus, on landing from the wreck : 
 
 Adr. Although this island seem to be desert, uninhabitable and 
 almost inaccessible, it must needs be of subtle, tender and delicate 
 temperance. 
 
 Ant. Temperance was a delicate wench. 
 
 Seb. Ay, and a subtle, as he most learnedly delivered. 
 
 Adr, The air breathes upon us here most sweetly. 
 
 Seb. As if it had lungs, and rotten ones. 
 
 Ant. Or as 'twere perfumed by a fen. 
 
 The caustic "asides" of the two princes have a 
 meaning which is less material to Prospero's isle than to 
 Adrian himself. His complacency comes out in aiiother 
 dialogue, arising out of their recent visit td Tunis to 
 marry Alonso's daughter to the king of that country. 
 
 Adr. Tunis was never graced before with such a paragon to 
 their queen. 
 
 Gon. Not since widow Dido's time. 
 
 Ant. Widow ! a pox 0' that ! How came that widow in ? 
 widow Dido ! 
 
 Seb. What if he had said "widower ^neas " too? Good 
 Lord, how you take it ! 
 
 Then comes the hit at Adrian's slowness of wit : 
 
 Adr. "Widow Dido " said you ? You m.ake me study of that • 
 she was of Carthage, not of Tunis. 
 Gon. This Tunis, sir, was Carthage. 
 Adr. Carthage ? 
 Gon. I assure you, Carthage. 
 
 99 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 The old cock, of slow wit, formal style, supple knees, 
 subtle, tender, delicate, and temperate, was Sir William 
 KnoUys, Comptroller and subsequently Treasurer of 
 the Household under Elizabeth, and now Master of 
 the Wards under James, with the rank of Baron KnoUys 
 and Viscount Wallingford. His engraved portrait, 
 taken two or three years after the date of 'The 
 Tempest,' when he was about seventy, shows him to 
 be a fresh-looking man, without a wrinkle on his face, 
 and erect of figure. He lived to the age of eighty- 
 nine, and was so agile in his old age that he rode out 
 on horseback to within a few months of his death. 
 He was some eleven years older than Fulke Greville, 
 but would have looked no older at sixty-eight than the 
 latter did at fifty-seven, an age at which most men 
 were " old " in those days. Hence the joke of the old 
 cock and the cockerel. 
 
 At the date of ' The Tempest,' KnoUys was not one 
 of Shakespeare-Prospero's " enemies " ; he had settled 
 scores with him long ago in the parts of Polonius 
 (Chap. XIV.) and Malvolio, and had shown mercy to 
 him in the part of Angelo (Chap. XIII.) ; and he now 
 brings on " the old cock " merely for a little mild fun. 
 KnoUys was the uncle of Essex, and had a very delicate 
 part to play in his nephew's conspiracy. I have no 
 doubt (in a subjective matter, of course) as to the 
 identity of Adrian, which I arrived at in the first 
 instance through his name. Shakespeare uses the 
 name of Adrian in only one other place, in a scene 
 of ' Coriolanus,' where it is given, in the text, to a 
 Volscian who is met and recognised by a Roman on 
 the road between Rome and Antium. The suggestion 
 of it for ' The Tempest ' seems to have come to him 
 when he was using Harington's translation of the 
 Orlando Furioso, from which he took numerous hints. 
 In Canto xxix., in which " called it a good and blessed 
 storm" is parallelled by Prospero's phrase '■'■blessedly 
 holp hither," there occurs at strophe 35 a reference 
 
POLITICAL MALCONTENTS 
 
 to Hadrian's fortress on the Tiber, opposite to which 
 Harington has printed on the margin " Moles Adriani, 
 now called castle of S. Angelo." This is one of the 
 things which the "eye doth catch," as Shakespeare's 
 often did in turning the leaves of a book ; it suggests 
 to him that Adrian will be the name in his new play 
 for the man who was called Angelo on the last occasion 
 of using him, in ' Measure for Measure.' All the names 
 of the princes and lords but this one are found in a 
 book from which the name of the Patagonian god 
 Setebos is also taken (Eden's History of Travaile, iSll)- 
 
 The Plot of Antonio and Sebastian, 
 Southampton and Essex 
 
 The identification of Sebastian and Antonio with 
 Lords Essex and Southampton, and of the abortive 
 conspiracy in the play with the attempted revolution 
 of 8th February 1601, of which these lords were the 
 leaders, is one of the most valuable revelations of ' The 
 Tempest ' — valuable even in a historical respect as show- 
 ing how Shakespeare viewed Southampton's share in the 
 plot. The identification turns upon a convergence of 
 probabilities, some of which are general, others particular. 
 In the first place, the plot in 'The Tempest' is an 
 academic affair, which does not bear upon the fortunes 
 of Prospero, but is introduced with the object mainly 
 of exhibiting the character of Antonio, who is Prospero's 
 arch-enemy. Secondly, the general circumstances of 
 the conspiracy are as nearly those of the actual historical 
 plot as they could be made, mutatis mutandis. The 
 minor point both in the real plot and in the romantic 
 was the natural succession to the crown. 
 
 In the play it is necessary to separate Ferdinand, the 
 king's son, from the other princes and lords for two 
 reasons : first, that the wooing of Miranda might take 
 place ; and secondly, that he should be supposed 
 drowned by his father as well as by the conspirators. 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 The separation of Ferdinand is indeed the step in the 
 action upon which the whole sequel depends.^ His 
 supposed death brings out the best side of his father's 
 character ; Alonso's sorrow is so marked that Dr. 
 Garnett takes it to be meant for the sorrow of King 
 James at the death of Prince Henry in 1613, and to be 
 the determining fact for dating the play. In the present 
 hypothesis, it is the natural regret of Lord Pembroke 
 that he had no heir begotten of his body, a theme 
 which was common ground between him and Shake- 
 speare from the time of the Sonnets. The supposed 
 drowning of Ferdinand is also turned to account to 
 introduce the conspiracy. In the actual conspiracy of 
 Essex, the succession to the English crown was always 
 in the background. Essex and his friends were in 
 correspondence with James VI., to whose succession 
 they looked for the redress of their grievances. On the 
 other hand, both Essex and Southampton believed that 
 their enemies at Court, including Raleigh and Cobham, 
 who were afterwards convicted in the attempt to place 
 the Lady Arabella Stuart on the throne, and including, 
 as they wrongly supposed. Sir Robert Cecil, were in 
 favour of the claims of the Spanish Infanta. In the 
 play the situation is necessarily different in details. 
 Claribel, the next heir after Ferdinand, had been 
 
 ' It is a point of some value for the disputed question of the prior date 
 of the ballad, "The Enchanted Island," that it does not separate the young 
 prince from his father. The ballad passed through the hands of J. Payne 
 Collier, and is found in spurious company. But it is not at all clear that 
 it is itself spurious, or that it was constructed at an early date out of the 
 materials of 'The Tempest.' Francis Douce was certainly right in his 
 appreciation of its style : " One of the most beautiful ballads I have ever 
 read." Collier says that it bore at the end the word and initials, " Finis. 
 R. G." — perhaps Robert Greene. The exiled king is of Arragon, and his 
 daughter's name, Ida, one of Greene's names in James IV. The rhythm is 
 the musical stave of Wordsworth's " Ruth," which is found in early English 
 ballads (see Guest, English Rhythms, 2nd ed. 1882, p. 590), and was used by 
 Drayton for a madrigal in his 8th Eclogue (1593). Greene had great 
 facility in the use of rhythms. If it was he who wrote the ballad, and 
 gave Shakespeare hints for his plot, we should be able to understand the 
 enigmatic tsQk in Act II., Scene i., about the ground of the island being 
 " tawny, with an eye of green in it." 
 
 102 
 
POLITICAL MALCONTENTS 
 
 married to the prince of Tunis, so that the whole 
 company of princes, lords, and others might be on 
 board a ship returning from the wedding, and be 
 wrecked on Prospero's isle, which is one of the Mediter- 
 ranean islands in Orlando Furioso. But the dialogue 
 upon Claribel's place in the succession, obscure as it is 
 in general, appears from some passages to have been 
 composed to suit the English case. Elizabeth was 
 besought by one minister after another to declare the 
 succession, but would give no sign until she was on her 
 deathbed, when she seemed to assent to James by raising 
 her hand at the mention of his name. In the play, the 
 king is reminded by Sebastian (Essex) that he had 
 been " kneeled to and importuned otherwise by all of 
 us," but had proved obstinate. Again Antonio's point, 
 that Tunis was so far off that the crown might be 
 seized before Claribel's succession could be effected, 
 with its enigmatic reference to the sun being post and 
 the " Man in the Moon too slow," is either meant for 
 some actual case or it has no meaning at all. 
 
 But the question of the succession is of minor im- 
 portance in the parable. It is the immediate occasion 
 and circumstances of the conspiracy between Antonio 
 and Sebastian, that correspond closely with the con- 
 spiracy of Essex, Southampton, and others in 1601. 
 Before anything is said of a plot in the play, Gonzalo 
 turns the conversation so as to bring out the discontent 
 of Antonio and Sebastian : 
 
 You are gentlemen of brave mettle : you would lift the Moon 
 out of her sphere if she would continue five weeks without 
 changing. 
 
 Seb. We would so, and then go a bat-fowling. 
 
 Bat-fowling was the sport of knocking down birds by 
 torch-light ; and the meaning here Is clearly that of 
 Webster, in an earlier play : " bat-fowling for offices 
 . . . i' the dark." This short dialogue sums up the 
 situation of Essex and other malcontents most tersely. 
 
 103 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 In Bacon's counsels to Essex, he used to draw a dis- 
 tinction, in his dry, legal manner, between the service 
 of " a declining prince " and of a prince newly come to 
 the throne. Elizabeth was most emphatically a de- 
 clining prince ; she had reigned too long : she was 
 the Moon in her fifth week. Not only the business of 
 State, but also business in ordinary, was stagnant under 
 the Queen's advancing years and increasing obstinacy 
 and parsimony. Thomas Dekker, although not the 
 man to cite for serious history, was doubtless correct 
 in his picture of the outburst of new life on the accession 
 of James : " Trades that lay dead and rotten started 
 out of their trance. . . . There was mirth in every one's 
 face, the streets were filled with gallants, tobacconists 
 filled up whole taverns, vintners hung out spick-and- 
 span new ivy-bushes (because they wanted good wine), 
 and their old rain-beaten lattices marched under other 
 colours, having lost both company and colour before." 
 
 Essex had also a particular reason to " lift the Moon 
 out of her sphere." Under the Tudor sovereigns the 
 public service was not organised as it is now. The 
 cost of foreign embassies and military expeditions fell 
 in part upon the nobles who undertook them, on the 
 understanding that they would be recouped by grants 
 of monopolies and the like. As the Queen advanced in 
 years she became more " humourous " and " cankered" : 
 Essex is reported by Raleigh to have said that "her 
 mind grew as crooked as her carcase." His own 
 monopoly of the sweet wines, which had been granted 
 him by way of return for his large outlays in the 
 service of the State, had expired in 1600, and had not 
 been renewed, so that he was in difficulties. South- 
 ampton had no hope of English employment while the 
 Queen lived. The Court was full of suitors discon- 
 tented by their pay being in arrears, or by the delay of 
 expected grants and patents ; so that there were many 
 ready to repair to the cave of AduUam. In the phrase 
 of 'The Tempest' it was "foul weather," a phrase 
 
 104 
 
LORD ESSEX 
 
 which is used with a political meaning in a letter to 
 Southampton from his friend Lord Henry Howard In 
 April 1599 (Cal. Cecil MSS. ix. 125). 
 
 Sebastian, Lord Essex 
 
 Such being the general correspondence of the political 
 situation in the play with the actual discontent in 
 the last years of Elizabeth, one may look with con- 
 fidence for particular marks of identity between the 
 scenic and the real malcontents. The chief of those 
 proofs, Antonio's use of Southampton's very phrase, 
 " Out of that ' no hope,' what great hope have we ! " 
 has been stated already (p. 91). Not less clear are the 
 marks of identity between Sebastian and Essex, of which 
 four may be given in the order in which they occur. 
 
 (i) On board the stranded ship, while the mariners 
 are calling out " All lost ! to prayers, to prayers ! ' 
 Sebastian makes a strange remark, " I'm out of 
 patience," implying that he was unable to bear the 
 suspense of a moment of peril. What is this but 
 Essex's " last fatal impatience," as Bacon called, and 
 most men considered, his desperate attempt? The 
 sentiment is equally true of Essex in respect of his 
 impatience to be put out of life after his arrest. 
 
 (2) Next to his impatience, we may take his brusque- 
 ness with Elizabeth. It was one of his favourite phrases, 
 preserved by Bacon in the A-pologie of 1 604, that " he 
 desired to do the Queen good against her will," so that 
 he was blunt and contentious with her to a degree 
 that probably no other courtier was. In the play, 
 Sebastian makes a brusque speech to the king, accusing 
 him of being the cause of their shipwreck, and ending 
 with, " The fault's your own." Gonzalo remonstrates 
 with him. 
 
 Gon. My lord Sebastian, 
 
 The truth you speak doth lack some gentleness, 
 And time to speak it in : you rub the sore 
 When you should bring the plaster. 
 
 105 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 Seb. Very well. 
 
 Ant. And most chirurgeonly. 
 
 Sebastian assents to the charge of rubbing the sore, and 
 Antonio declares it to have been good surgery ; which 
 is as near as possible to Essex's protestation that " he 
 desired to do the Queen good against her will." 
 
 (3) One of Essex's characteristics was irresolution, 
 scruples, misgivings, readiness to give up at a check, so 
 that he would retire for a time from the Court to his 
 estates as if in petulance. So marked was this trait that 
 he is often supposed to have been the original of Hamlet 
 in respect of irresolution. In the play, Antonio upbraids 
 Essex with apathy : 
 
 Ant. Noble Sebastian, 
 
 Thou let'st thy fortune sleep. . . . 
 
 Seb. Well, I am standing water. 
 
 Ant. I'll teach you how to flow. 
 
 Seb. Do so : to ebb 
 
 Hereditary sloth instructs me. 
 
 And, when it comes to action in the plot which follows, 
 Sebastian hesitates at the critical moment : 
 
 Ant. Draw together : 
 
 And when I rear my hand, do you the like, 
 To fall it on Gonzalo. 
 
 Seb. O, but one word [They talk apart, — 
 
 and while they are talking the threatened men are 
 aroused by Ariel singing in Gonzalo's ear. 
 
 (4) Essex was peculiarly subject to religious remorse. 
 He told his chaplain before his death that even in the 
 field his sins would rise up before him and make him a 
 coward. His death-bed repentance was so extreme as 
 to suggest that his mind was unhinged. Sebastian's 
 remorseful conscience is mentioned twice. Prospero 
 upbraids him gently with having abetted or assented to 
 his expulsion from Milan, and adds, " Thou art pinch'd 
 for't now, Sebastian." The plot against the King of 
 Naples was originally Antonio's, 
 
 106 
 
LORD SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 with Sebastian, 
 Whose inward pinches therefore are most strong, — 
 
 nothing being said of Antonio's pinches, who was 
 untroubled by conscience. 
 
 These four traits are not only highly characteristic 
 of Essex, but they are recalled with an absence of all 
 harshness, as if out of tenderness to the memory of 
 one dead. 
 
 Antonio, Lord Southampton 
 
 The character of Antonio is displayed at greater 
 length than that of Sebastian, leaving the impression of 
 a man hard, clever, conscienceless, cynical, as well as 
 ambitious and unscrupulous. He disclaims conscience 
 in set terms : " I feel not this deity in my bosom." 
 He insinuates that honest old Gonzalo is capable of 
 peculation, and that Adrian and Francisco will " take 
 suggestion as a cat laps milk," while his last speech is 
 to describe Caliban as "a plain fish, and no doubt 
 marketable." The identity of Antonio with Lord 
 Southampton is not proved by his character only, which 
 is not so distinctive of any one statesman as that of 
 Sebastian is, but rather by his part in the academic 
 conspiracy within the play, and by his relations with 
 Sebastian therein. The character of Antonio is, at all 
 events, not unsuited to Lord Southampton. He appears 
 to have been a cynic from his youth up ; for his college 
 essay, written in Latin at the age of thirteen, at the end 
 of his first year at St. John's College, Cambridge, was 
 upon the theme : " Omnes ad studium virtutis incitantur 
 spe premii " — All are incited to the cultivation of virtue 
 by the hope of reward. It was sent to Lord Burghley, 
 his guardian as Master of the Wards, and is endorsed, 
 « 22nd July 1586 " (Cal. Hatfield MSS. iii. 151). Of 
 his cleverness there is no question. He soon made his 
 mark at Court, being conspicuous by his fine person, 
 high spirit, and wit. The Queen, however, appears to 
 
 107 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 have shown him little favour. On ist February 1598 
 one of the Sidney letters records : "He is much troubled 
 at her Majesty's straungest usage of him." Later in the 
 same year the Queen directed Sir Robert Cecil to tell 
 him that his conduct had been "very contemptuous," 
 probably to herself, as it was certainly heartless or 
 callous to his newly wedded wife (see Chapter IX.). 
 After the accession of James he became a powerful 
 noble ; but he held no other office to the end of his 
 life than that of Vice-Admiral. Many eulogies were 
 written upon him before and after his death, which have 
 been collected by Malone in his great Shakespearian 
 work ; they are, however, so pointless, if not insincere, 
 that they add nothing to what we know of his character 
 incidentally. 
 
 In ' The Tempest ' Antonio is prominent in two 
 events : first in the ousting of Prospero from his 
 dukedom of Milan, which is related at great length 
 by the exile himself to Miranda at the opening of the 
 play ; and secondly, in the abortive plot against the 
 King of Naples, which passes in the action of the play 
 itself. Sebastian reminds him that the latter enterprise 
 is akin to the former : 
 
 Thy case, dear friend. 
 Shall be my precedent ; as thou got'st Milan 
 I'll come by Naples. 
 
 It will be convenient to take first Antonio's share In 
 the plot within the play, as expressing Shakespeare's 
 view of Southampton's part in the Essex conspiracy. 
 
 The conspiracy against the King of Naples is brought 
 into ' The Tempest ' for some other purpose than to 
 influence the main action : it is altogether outside the 
 affairs of Prospero, and comes to an end In failure after 
 It has served its purpose. Its purpose is, to exhibit 
 Antonio as the evil genius of Sebastian. He whispers 
 the treason into his ear, dangles the crown before his 
 eyes, and prescribes to him what he is to do both at 
 
 108 
 
SOUTHAMPTON'S POLITICS 
 
 the first attempt and in anticipation of the second. 
 Throughout the dialogue their political sentiments are 
 on the whole similar ; usually Sebastian speaks first, 
 Antonio capping his remark with something stronger, 
 more incisive, or more cynical. This is not at all the 
 historical view of Southampton's part in the political 
 movement which resulted in the fiasco of 8 th February 
 1 60 1. Essex and Southampton were tried together 
 and on the same charges before their peers, and both 
 were condemned to death. The counsel for the Crown 
 were the Attorney- and Solicitor-General and Bacon. 
 It was the latter who pressed the case most strongly, 
 on the ground of motive and long premeditation ; and 
 this was done wholly as against Essex, who was, of 
 course, the protagonist by reason of his eminence in the 
 State and his former close relations with the Queen. 
 But it will appear from Bacon's Declaration touching 
 the Treasons of the late Earl of Essex and his Com- 
 plices (which was his own compilation, although he 
 sought afterwards to shelter himself behind the Queen's 
 command, instructions, and revision) that he aimed 
 at magnifying the treason of Essex by extenuating that 
 of the accomplices. This is specially notable in the 
 case of Southampton. He is introduced late in Bacon's 
 narrative, after Candlemas 1601 : "There met at this 
 council [in Drury House] the Earl of Southampton, 
 with whom in former times he [Essex] had been at 
 some emulations and diflferences in Court. But after, 
 Southampton having married his kinswoman, and 
 plunged himself wholly into his fortune, and being his 
 continual associate in Ireland, he accounted of him as 
 most assured unto him, and had long ago in Ireland 
 acquainted him with his purpose, as was declared before. 
 Sir Charles Davers, one exceedingly devoted to the 
 Earl of Southampton, upon affection begun first upon 
 the deserving of the same Earl towards him, when he 
 was in trouble about the murther of one Long," etc. 
 That is to say, Essex gained over Southampton, formerly 
 
 109 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST* 
 
 at variance with him, by family interest, not by the 
 sympathy of their political aims ; and Southampton 
 brought with him Sir Charles Davers, his own ally in 
 an equally private way. There is, of course, an element 
 of truth in this cunning sentence, or Bacon would not 
 be Bacon. It is impossible to check the assertion that 
 Essex had been " at some emulations and differences " 
 with Southampton at Court, until the marriage of the 
 latter with Mistress Bess Vernon, to save her reputation, 
 in August 1598. His relations with the maid-of- 
 honour had begun as early as 1595 ; and meanwhile 
 he had accompanied Essex on the Spanish voyage in 
 1596 and on the Island voyage in 1597. Essex's most 
 immediate interest in him after the marriage was to 
 extricate him from his gambling follies in Paris, the 
 poor lady being all the while at Essex House awaiting 
 her confinement. It is almost certain that there were 
 " differences," if not " emulations," after the marriage 
 as well as before it, and that they were alike unconnected 
 with political principles. In so far as we can diagnose 
 Southampton's policy, it was that of a malcontent noble, 
 aggrieved at the arbitrary rule of the Tudor sovereigns. 
 (See under ' Richard 11.' in Chapter VIII.) 
 
 Secondly, Bacon gave a colour to the motive of 
 Essex in appointing Southampton his Lord -General 
 of the Horse for the Irish campaign, by his warrant 
 of 15th April 1599. The nomination to offices under 
 him had been a matter of terms on accepting the 
 command, and he had insisted upon reserving for 
 himself that and other appointments. The Queen dis- 
 approved of Southampton very strongly, and demanded 
 his recall in June or July in the midst of the campaign. 
 Essex's rational and generous motives in appointing 
 him would have been, to give him the service which he 
 was desirous of but could never get from the Queen 
 herself, and to have an able and gallant general of the 
 horse. Bacon, however, asserts that his motive was 
 simply and solely to pick a quarrel with the Queen — 
 
 no 
 
SOUTHAMPTON'S POLITICS 
 
 " having placed him, no question, to that end to find 
 cause of discontentment." 
 
 Thirdly, and most important of all, Bacon garbled 
 the evidence of Southampton, with or without his 
 consent, in the very serious matter of Essex's expressed 
 intention to bring two or three thousand of his army 
 in Ireland to Milford Haven and to march upon 
 London, after having come to an understanding with 
 Tyrone and the Irish rebels. The other witness to the 
 conversation when this was broached was Sir Christopher 
 Blount, whose signed deposition states that it took place 
 in his own rooms at Dublin Castle a few days before the 
 march into Ulster had begun — before Essex had en- 
 countered Tyrone at all. Bacon garbled this by 
 omitting the sentence in which Blount fixed the date ; 
 so that we should not have known the truth had not 
 the original of his deposition been found among the 
 State Papers. The original of Southampton's signed 
 deposition has never been found ; Bacon merely printed 
 (in an Appendix) what purports to be the text of it, 
 without his signature ; from which it appears that the 
 meeting in Blount's rooms at Dublin Castle took place 
 " on a day " — as if it were not of capital importance 
 to the guilt or innocence of Essex in the matter of 
 complicity with Tyrone to have the date fixed. It is 
 impossible to prove that Southampton himself omitted 
 the date ; the vagueness of the phrase " on a day " 
 appears to be studied, and may have been adopted by 
 the deponent upon suggestion. 
 
 Southampton's life was spared by the Queen's 
 prerogative of mercy, and probably by pre-arrangement. 
 In what is called his " confession," which is not a con- 
 fession at all but a pathetic appeal for mercy, he 
 declared that he was led into the plot purely by the 
 love he bore to Essex ; and that was the line taken by 
 Sir Robert Cecil, namely, " That the poor young Earl, 
 merely for the love of Essex, had been drawn into this 
 action." His advice on the fatal morning, or, as Essex 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 wrote, " in the confusion they [his accomplices] drew 
 him into even in his own house that morning that he 
 went into the City," was not inquired into. It is known 
 that there were two parties aniong Essex's followers, 
 one extreme and the other moderate, that nothing was 
 fixed, and that Essex's fatal mistake of attempting to 
 raise the City was a sudden resolution — by whom advised 
 we do not know. Southampton's name escapes mention 
 in all such references to motive and instigation (which 
 include Blount and Davers among those who were 
 executed, as well as Essex's sister, Lady Rich), as if he 
 had really been the " poor young Earl " that Cecil 
 wished the world to think,^ Essex himself, in his 
 last days, showed his magnanimity by speaking of 
 Southampton in such terms as to help save his life. 
 When Southampton was released from the Tower on 
 the accession of James, in April 1603, one of those to 
 congratulate him was Bacon, in a brief letter of which 
 the principal sentence is : " This great change hath 
 wrought in'me no other change towards your lordship 
 than this, that I may safely be now that which I was 
 truly before " — that is to say, he had been his friend 
 in secret during the State Trial. The interest of this 
 revelation is, that in 'The Tempest' Francisco is the 
 lord in attendance upon Antonio. It is true that he 
 could not have been attached to Sebastian, who is Essex, 
 nor to Alonso (Pembroke), inasmuch as Gonzalo (Fulke 
 Greville) was, by his devotion to the memory of Sir 
 Philip Sidney, " a loyal sir to him thou followest " ; 
 but there was no need to make Francisco (with pointed 
 reference to Bacon) one of the lords at all ; and as 
 there is a certain fitness in Gonzalo following Alonso 
 and in Adrian following Sebastian, it is probable that 
 
 1 Camden, who was present throughout the State Trial, thus summarises 
 Southampton's defence : " Southamptonius mitiori oratione, et imprimis 
 modesta, culpam ex amore in Essexium contractam submisse deprecatus, 
 fidemque in Principem integerrimam protestatus . . . Nee quod con- 
 sultatum fuit, sed aliud, in actum erupisse, nempe ingressum ill Urt?ta. 
 . . . Se toto die gladium non strinxisse." — Annates Reg. Eliz. 
 
 112 
 
SOUTHAMPTON'S LITERARY AMBITION 
 
 Shakespeare meant something in attaching Francisco to 
 Antonio. 
 
 More important than Antonio's part in the pohtical 
 plot with Sebastian is his former usurpation of Prospero's 
 dukedom, now some twelve years ago. He is the chief 
 among Prospero's "enemies," the only one of them 
 whom he forgives coldly and formally in the last Act : 
 
 For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother 
 Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive 
 Thy rankest fault ; all of them. 
 
 The story of his usurpation is told to Miranda in 
 a long and difficult narrative, which taxed the poor 
 child's dutiful attention to her father. Prospero is 
 curiously at a loss to express himself clearly and 
 simply. If it had been the banished Duke in the 
 forest of Arden, or the King of Navarre with his 
 attendant lords in a country retreat, we should have 
 been put in possession of the facts by a few plain words. 
 The antecedents of the exile in ' The Tempest ' are 
 obscure, improbable, mysterious, prolix to tell, and 
 impossible to make coherent. One could understand 
 Robert Browning going deep into the psychology of 
 an Italian political plot, but it is not Shakespeare's 
 usual way. The explanation is, that he has a private 
 and personal story to tell under the guise and in the 
 terminology of political history. 
 
 Twelve years before the scene opens, Prospero was 
 Duke of Milan and a prince of power, reputed the 
 prime duke in dignity among the signories, and for 
 the liberal arts without a parallel. Those arts being 
 all his study, he cast the government upon his brother, 
 forgot his state, and became wrapt in secret studies. 
 His brother Antonio, in whom he reposed a confidence 
 sans bound, and loved of all the world next to the 
 little Miranda, entered upon a course of gradual usurpa- 
 tion, which is described by the help of a great variety 
 of metaphor and with strange redundancy. Being 
 
 "3 I 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 accustomed to pass as the ruler, and being in^ effect 
 the regent, Antonio came to believe that he was indeed 
 the duke, and, his ambition growing, he needs will be 
 absolute Milan. Unable to oust Prospero without 
 help, he made terms with Prospero's inveterate enemy, 
 the King of Naples, who, on condition that Milan 
 should lose its independence, sent an army. One 
 midnight fated to the purpose, Antonio opened the 
 gates of Milan, occupied the city with the foreign 
 troops, and hurried off the bookish Prospero and his 
 three-year old daughter to a vessel in readiness, from 
 which they were transhipped, a few leagues out, into 
 the rotten carcase of a butt, and sent adrift at the mercy 
 of the winds and waves. 
 
 This is a very strange history of a usurpation. 
 Such things happened not unfrequently in Italian and 
 Spanish states, and were made the subject of plays, for 
 example, by Marston and Greene ; but amongst them 
 there is nothing like Prospero's deposition. A prince 
 "for the liberal arts without a parallel" might have 
 been another Lorenzo de Medici, if he had minded his 
 affairs of State. Even when he became wrapt in secret 
 studies, he might have been another Charles V., retiring 
 to a cloister to please himself. Having let things drift 
 until his brother had to rule in his place, he might still 
 have submitted to the inevitable deposition like the 
 Emperor Ferdinand when he retired in semi-state to 
 Prague. But he is surprised at his brother's " lie " in 
 making believe that he was " indeed the duke " ; he is 
 indignant that he should have been deposed and exiled ; 
 and, most strangely of all, he recalls the love that his 
 people bore him without reflecting that they had made 
 not the slightest show of resistance to the coup d'etat. 
 
 Shakespeare would not have exhibited Duke Prospero 
 in such a coil of paradoxes and improbabilities had not 
 his deposition been a parable of his own loss of the 
 Laurel Crown. So interpreted, the story becomes 
 plain, consistent, probable, although certainly surprising. 
 
 114 
 
SOUTHAMPTON'S USURPATION 
 
 The greatest surprise is that Lord Southampton, whom 
 we know only as his patron, should have been the prime 
 mover in the plot to deprive him of the titular kingship 
 of letters. From the Sonnets we know that Lord 
 Herbert failed him in his promised support for the 
 laureateship, and can guess that he did so at some one's 
 instigation. My own guess was that it was at his 
 mother's, the Countess of Pembroke's instigation, on 
 account of her old favour for Samuel Daniel. No one 
 could have guessed that the person behind the scenes 
 was Southampton, that Shakespeare was kept out of 
 his reward through a set being made against him, and 
 that the inoffensive Daniel's candidature was merely a 
 blind, insomuch that he never got his patent for the 
 office, which was in a kind of commission until within 
 a f&'N months of Shakespeare's death. The details of 
 all this would be a strange revelation if told as matter 
 of fact. I believe that they are told in parable in ' The 
 Tempest,' and that it is not altogether hopeless to 
 reconstruct from the parable the circumstances which 
 had arisen in Southampton's patronage of Shakespeare 
 so as to have made him his enemy just at the time when 
 the question of the laureateship came up. 
 
 AH that we know for certain of his relations with 
 Lord Southampton is, that he chose him in 1593 to 
 receive the dedication of ' Venus and Adonis,' a " strong 
 prop " to support a weak burden, a noble godfather to 
 the first heir of his invention ; and that he addressed 
 him a year after, in the dedication of ' Lucrece,' in words 
 which imply close intimacy, devotion, and perhaps 
 obligation. It is not to be supposed that Shakespeare's 
 instinct was at fault either in the choice of a patron or 
 in making much of him afterwards. His lordship was 
 certainly distinguished among his peers not only by 
 the graces of his person, but also by his intellect. His 
 was the combination of Dumaine : 
 
 For he hath wit to make an ill shape good, 
 And shape to win grace though he had no wit. 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 He appears to have made good use of his time at 
 college, and he may be assumed to have entered on 
 the great world with natural abilities cultivated to the 
 greatest advantage. Although he was nine years 
 younger than Shakespeare, his better education would 
 have brought him, in the year 1593 and at the age of 
 twenty, on a par with the self-educated man of twenty- 
 nine, and given him the superiority in some things. The 
 history of their intimacy is absolutely unknown from 
 external sources ; it can only be matter of speculation. 
 But it is matter of legitimate speculation ; nay more, 
 the problem is forced upon us by various things, for 
 example, by the absence of any mention of Southampton 
 in the dedication of the folio of 1623. The safe 
 ground and warrant of speculation I hold to be the 
 parable of Antonio as the usurping Duke of Milan. 
 Antonio is Prospero's brother and his vicegerent, 
 having the manage of his estate, representing him in 
 the face of the world. But next, " he was the ivy that 
 had hid my princely trunk, and sucked my verdure out." 
 He entertained ambition, expelled remorse (tender 
 feeling) and nature, and set himself to deprive the 
 playwright of the credit and reward of his labours for 
 the stage ! It is this part of the parable that seems so 
 improbable to us after three centuries. It is not so 
 difficult to believe that Shakespeare may have found 
 Lord Southampton's help useful in various ways, and 
 that his lordship may have expected a considerable quid 
 pro quo. For there is the tradition that his patron helped 
 him with money. Rowe, the original and judicious 
 biographer of Shakespeare in 1709, thought the story 
 worth repeating because it descended through Davenant, 
 who was Shakespeare's godson and a boy of nine at the 
 poet's death. He gives the amount at a thousand 
 pounds, and the occasion of the gift " to enable him 
 to go through with a purchase which he heard he had 
 a mind to." At Stratford-on-Avon they supposed that 
 the purchase meant was that of New Place, which the 
 
 116 
 
SOUTHAMPTON'S PATRONAGE 
 
 poet acquired in the spring of 1597 by payment of a 
 first fine of sixty pounds. Halliwell-Phillipps, who has 
 gleaned a number of minor details after Malone's first 
 harvest, has found that there was a process entered in 
 the same year to lift the mortgage of forty pounds upon 
 his mother's landed inheritance of Asbies, which prob- 
 ably meant that he had the money ready. Others have 
 supposed that the purchase which he had a mind to 
 was the share, which he certainly held from an unknown 
 date, in the Globe Theatre, originally built in Shoreditch 
 in 1595 and transferred to its more famous location on 
 the Bankside, Southwark, in 1599. Either of those 
 purchases is believed to have been beyond his means 
 about the age of thirty or thirty-two unless he had 
 been helped. But the thousand pounds mentioned in 
 1 709 can hardly have been in the Elizabethan currency, 
 which would have represented about eight thousand 
 present value. Whatever its exact amount, it was 
 probably a handsome gift. The young lord was 
 magnificent and lavish, but it is a mistake to suppose 
 that he was generous and impulsive ; on the contrary, 
 his disposition was cynical and cold. Moreover, he was 
 not so rich that he could spare large sums for other 
 purposes than his own costly living and pleasures. In 
 an extant letter from him to Lord Essex, in the autumn 
 of 1598, he explains that he had been in trouble with 
 his creditors before he went abroad at the beginning 
 of that year ; yet he found means to gamble deeply at 
 tennis in Paris between those dates, and had lost many 
 thousands of crowns. There is another indication, a 
 small one, that he had been pinched for money about 
 1596 or 1597. John Florio, the Italian scholar, was 
 one of those patronised by him. His World of Wordes, 
 an Italian-English dictionary, which would have been 
 expensive to print and slow to sell, was entered on the 
 Stationers' Register in 1596, with the unusual detail 
 that it was "dedicated to the Earl of Southampton." 
 But the publication was delayed, for some reason, until 
 
 "7 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 1598 ; and then it was found to be dedicated to two 
 others besides the intended sole patron, namely, the 
 Countess of Bedford and the Earl of Rutland. Suppos- 
 ing that Southampton had found the money to set 
 Shakespeare up as a theatrical proprietor, he may have 
 understood it only as a loan, or as an investment in 
 which he kept an interest ; and it may have turned 
 out eventually to be one of those cases in which " loan 
 oft loses both itself and friend." Shakespeare himself 
 was remarkably careful in his lendings, and was probably 
 a better man of business than his noble patron. 
 
 Another way in which Lord Southampton could 
 have helped the playwright was by giving him the run 
 of his library. Shakespeare must have been an 
 omnivorous reader. The fourteen thousand words of 
 his vocabulary were not found among the yeomen of 
 Warwickshire nor extracted from the atmosphere 
 of London playhouses. Several passages in 'The 
 Tempest' make it clear that Prospero was not only 
 a book-lover but absolutely dependent upon books. 
 When he was sent adrift from Milan, the considerate 
 Gonzalo 
 
 Of his gentleness, 
 Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me 
 From mine own library with volumes that 
 I prize above my dukedom. 
 
 And Caliban, addressing the drunken butler and the 
 jester (Ben Jonson and Marston), says : 
 
 Remember 
 First to possess his books ; for without them 
 He's but a sot, as I am. . . . 
 
 Burn but his books. 
 He has brave utensils — for so he calls them — 
 Which, when he has a house, he'll deck withal. 
 
 Every word is meant, and meant of Shakespeare 
 himself. 
 
 Of his actual use of Southampton's library about 
 1596 I shall be able to give instances in Chapter VIII. 
 
 118 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 But neither the use of his library nor the gift of a 
 large sum of money can account for Lord South- 
 ampton's pretensions before the world to be "indeed 
 the Duke." The parable of Antonio, as the usurper 
 of the duchy of Milan, is related with so much 
 particularity, not without repetition or redundancy, 
 that we may extract from it some hints of the nature 
 of this unique literary partnership, and of the grounds 
 upon which Southampton had based his pretensions. 
 From Shakespeare's point of view, these pretensions 
 were baseless ; Antonio was guilty of a most wicked 
 " lie," which grew out of an illusion. Thus we hear 
 only one side of the case ; and that side of it which we 
 do not hear, although it cannot possibly affect the 
 supremacy of Shakespeare in intellectual power, is yet 
 a matter of peculiar interest, as all questions of col- 
 laboration are, and is even a matter of fairness to the 
 inferior party. As we cannot hear Southampton nor 
 any impartial witness, let us take Shakespeare's own 
 data. 
 
 The intimacy of Antonio with Prospero was so 
 close that he is figured as a brother, whom of all the 
 world he loved next to his own offspring the child 
 Miranda. He reposed in Antonio " a confidence sans 
 bound," and " put to him the manage of his state." 
 This absolute trust in Antonio is emphasised in three or 
 four places ; it is hardly conceivable in a real political 
 situation, in an age and in a country which produced 
 the maxims of Machiavelli. It does not even appear 
 that Prospero was aware of his brother's ambition until 
 his rude awakening " one midnight fated to the 
 purpose," when he was hurried on board a vessel. 
 The unsuspecting duke, rapt in his secret studies, saw 
 nothing of what was passing under his eyes, but saw 
 the whole plot as if in a revelation on looking back. 
 The stages of the usurpation, thus made clear, are then 
 recalled. The beginning is a certain personal influence 
 of Antonio : he was " perfected how to grant suits, 
 
 119 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 how to deny them." This is said of the administrative 
 officers of the State, so that, in form, it can be no 
 allegory of the relations between Southampton and 
 Shakespeare. Notwithstanding this formal difficulty, 
 such an allegorical intention may be suspected from the 
 kind of phrases used and the variety of them. Antonio, 
 it appears, 
 
 new created 
 The creatures that were mine, I say, or changed 'em, 
 Or else new formed 'em ; having both the key 
 Of officer and office, set all hearts i' the state 
 To what tune pleased his ear ; that now he was 
 The ivy which had hid my princely trunk. 
 And suck'd my verdure out on't. 
 
 The simple thing for one to do who was conspiring at 
 usurpation was to fill the offices with his creatures. 
 But that was not what Antonio did : he new created 
 the creatures that were Prospero's, or changed them, or 
 else new formed them. In these phrases, carefully 
 chosen and repeated, we have the allegory betrayed. 
 Prospero, the lawful duke, ruling with the love of his 
 people, had no need of "creatures." Supposing that 
 we admit " creatures " in his own duchy, how could a 
 usurper "new create" them? He could, indeed, 
 "change 'em," or he could win them over without 
 dismissing them ; but he " new created " them, and, 
 where he did not " change 'em," he " new formed 'em." 
 Again he did so, not that he might rely upon them, 
 but that he might be gratified with " what tune pleased 
 his ear." This is not political work, but literary. 
 Prospero's creatures were Shakespeare's creations for 
 the stage. Southampton, "being perfected how to 
 grant suits, how to deny them," was allowed by the 
 obliged author to " new create " his creatures, or to 
 change them, or else " new form " them, which is the 
 dominant idea of " new create " turning up again. 
 Thus he " set all hearts i' the state to what tune pleased 
 his ear " ; he imposed his own taste, gave a colour to 
 the characterisation and the action. I shall show, in 
 
; ^'.SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 Chapter VIIL, how that can be explained for certain of 
 the plays, most of all for ' Richard IL' Having thus 
 been suffered to give effect to his own views, tastes, or 
 fancies, he finds himself in a position to mask the real 
 author — 
 
 that now he was 
 
 The ivy which had hid ray princely trunk, 
 
 And suck'd my verdure out on't. 
 
 The figure of the ivy and the trunk will not seem 
 strange to a generation which has been so taken with 
 the notion that Shakespeare was the ivy which hid the 
 princely trunk of Francis Bacon. The allegory in 
 ' The Tempest ' reverses the relation ; it is Prospero's 
 princely trunk which is hid by the ivy of Antonio. 
 Leaving the figure of the ivy and the trunk, we come 
 to an expansion of the idea without metaphor : 
 
 Like one 
 Who having into truth, by telling of it, 
 Made such a sinner of his memory 
 To credit his own lie, he did believe 
 He was indeed the duke. 
 
 The words " having into truth " are unfortunately 
 corrupted, a rare accident in a text which is remarkably 
 pure, and the more regrettable that it happens at a 
 critical place. The correction usually adopted " having 
 unto truth " does not really help the sense. An equally 
 slight change of one letter, namely, the " h " of 
 " having " into " br," gives " braving into truth," or 
 bluffing ; and that makes a perfect sense. I was led to 
 make this correction from finding in my own note- 
 book, written hurriedly with a quill, the words " thras- 
 onical braving " (extracted from Gabriel Harvey upon 
 Greene) to read as if " thrasonical having." It is easy 
 to mistake " br " for " h " in handwriting ; and it is 
 nearly certain that the same mistake of Shakespeare's 
 own hand had been made in composing the type of 
 'A Lover's Complaint' (1609), line 236 : 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 For she was sought by spirits of richest coat, 
 Whose rarest havings made the blossoms dote. 
 
 Both the sense and the rhythm here require " bravings," 
 which is common enough as an intransitive participle, 
 easily convertible into a substantive. Let us assume, 
 then, that Antonio was in the habit of bluffing. By 
 repeating what he knew to be untrue, he came to 
 believe it, " to credit his own lie." Antonio was not 
 singular in that ; it is a well-known phenomenon of the 
 mind, which is not even reckoned morbid. It is easy 
 to imagine his opportunities — at the theatre, sitting on 
 the stage among his noble friends, and claiming this or 
 that as his own. From that more or less harmless 
 brag his ambition grew — 
 
 To have no screen between the part he played 
 And him he play'd it for, he needs will be 
 Absolute Milan. 
 
 While all these pretensions are quite intelligible In a 
 literary patron and collaborator, their minutely analysed 
 origin and growth makes them seem improbable for 
 actual politics. If there had been no allegory, it would 
 have been unnecessary to weary Miranda with a long 
 narrative, which is remarkable, if not unique, among 
 Shakespeare's for its redundancy and prolixity, and its 
 utter improbability for all the pains taken. In the 
 end the attempt to keep up the figure of political 
 exile is abandoned ; for Prospero and Miranda are put 
 into " the rotten carcase of a butt" when it would have 
 been just as easy to have written " boat." Shakespeare's 
 love of a jest gets the better of his grave sense of 
 consistency : this is the famous butt of wine, or rather 
 the rotten carcase of it, which is (or was) one of the 
 perquisites of the Poet Laureate. Prospero was cast 
 adrift in an old wine-cask and driven by the winds and 
 waves to a desert island. Moreover, the rats had left 
 this rotten cask just as if it had been a ship ; and there 
 was room in it for Prospero and the little Miranda, as 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 well as for all those necessaries and luxuries which the 
 good Gonzalo provided. Without entering into the 
 joke we shall never extricate the sense. 
 
 Thus far we have been dealing with the inception 
 and growth of an ambition on the part of Antonio to 
 be indeed the duke ; the occasion and means by which 
 he effected his purpose remain for the sequel. At 
 this point it becomes necessary to inquire whether 
 Lord Southampton, whom we have reasons for suspect- 
 ing to be exhibited as Antonio in the political plot with 
 Sebastian (Essex), could ever have been Antonio in the 
 sense of Shakespeare's collaborator in work for the 
 stage. It has been one result of discussing the Baconian 
 caprice that many who will credit Francis Bacon with no 
 more poetry than his Psalms and the one sonnet on 
 Lord Essex, which he admits having " prepared " for 
 the Queen, "though I profess not to be a poet," in 
 December 1 599, are yet willing to entertain the hypothesis 
 that Shakespeare must have had some one collaborator 
 or anotheir. The one thing in the Baconian hypothesis 
 which has gained for it a certain degree of credence or 
 antecedent tolerance among the " open-minded " is their 
 difficulty in accounting for Shakespeare's works as the 
 productions of a man who had no college education, 
 and was all the while busy as an actor, if not also as an 
 actor-manager. It is not unreasonable to suppose that 
 he had a "ghost," or at all events a " devil." It is all 
 the more reasonable to entertain that conjecture, as we 
 know in matter of fact that Robert Greene accused him 
 in 1592 of being "an upstart crow beautified with our 
 feathers," and that Ben Jonson, in or about 1601, 
 called him a filching ape, a bold thief, who " takes up 
 all, makes each man's wit his own." But these very 
 accusations, with their dates and the circumstances in 
 which they were made, teach us to look for modes 
 of appropriation, conveyance, assimilation, economic 
 utilisation, as various as the genius of the man himself. 
 With so exceptional a personality as Shakespeare it is 
 
 123 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 the unexpected that comes to light. One unexpected 
 result to me, as it is sure to be to others, is that his 
 first and only patron, Lord Southampton, actually 
 worked with him, down to 1598, in the construction 
 of several of his most famous plays. But a still more 
 unexpected result is that his " devil," whom he employed 
 as late as 'Cymbeline,' was the very same plausible," 
 verbose, and ridiculous person whom he held up to the 
 scorn and laughter of mankind (after his death) as 
 Parolles in ' All's Well that Ends Well,' having exhibited 
 him previously as Pistol and as Don Armado. This was 
 Barnabe Barnes, a poet who was thought of great promise 
 when he began as a youth, but missed his mark and fell 
 into utter disrepute, so that even his name is nearly 
 forgotten. I must make some attempt to prove these 
 assertions, both as regards Lord Southampton and 
 Barnes ; but I anticipate the greatest difficulty in 
 making any headway with the proof of two such novel 
 propositions. To those who insist upon the rule of 
 criminal evidence, that the strength of a proof is the 
 strength of its weakest link, I give up the case at once. 
 To my own mind it is the mass and momentum of con- 
 verging probabilities (as Newman says) that brings 
 belief. But evidence of that kind, whether in medical 
 research as a regular occupation, or in literary inquiries 
 as a relaxation, I have always found impossible to draw 
 out for others without the loss of innumerable slight 
 indications, which had gone far to form and confirm 
 one's belief. That is especially the case with the 
 collateral lights from the miscellaneous literature of a 
 period. But the attempt must be made, as the matter 
 is of the first importance for understanding the allegory 
 of the usurping Duke of Milan in 'The Tempest.' 
 This excursus will interrupt the exposition of that play 
 for a considerable space. 
 
 It will be necessary to deal first with Shakespeare's 
 earliest work for the stage, when he was a dresser of 
 other men's plays, and apparently without literary 
 
 124 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 ambition of his own except in the direction of classical 
 Ovidian verse. Next it falls to show that Lord 
 Southampton himself had both the ability and the 
 ambition to be a poet of a sort, the highly successful 
 anonymous poem called Willobie his Avis a being identified 
 as his. Thereafter it wiU be comparatively easy to show 
 that Shakespeare's first proper and original dramatic work 
 was undertaken about the year 1 594, in conjunction with 
 his patron, and continued on the same terms for three 
 or four years. 
 
 125 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 SHAKESPEARE "BUYS THE REVERSION OF OLD PLAYS " 
 
 The date which I would fix for Shakespeare's first 
 writing of wholly original plays, at the instigation of 
 Lord Southampton and in collaboration with his lord- 
 ship, is the year 1594, their first joint work having 
 been the piece entered by Henslowe as 'The Venetian 
 Comedy,' first published in a highly polished form in 
 1 600 as a work by Shakespeare, with the title of ' The 
 Merchant of Venice.' Before that time his poetic 
 ambition had been to produce classical verse, as he 
 avows plainly enough in the Latin motto which he 
 chose for ' Venus and Adonis ' : 
 
 Let the vulgar admire vile things ; to me may golden Apollo 
 offer full draughts from the Castalian spring. 
 
 But in the way of business, as a player and as a useful 
 man, or " Johannes factotum," to the theatrical managers, 
 such as Henslowe, he had been working, more or less 
 against the grain, at those vile things which the vulgar 
 admired. The date of his settling in London was not 
 later than 1587, and probably not earlier than 1586 ; 
 so that we have to imagine him at work in one way 
 or another for some five or six years before we hear him 
 authentically named by Greene in the autumn of 1592 
 as a Johannes factotum and an upstart crow. Within 
 a few months of those epithets he came out as a genuine 
 poet with his ' Venus and Adonis.' 
 
 T26 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S MOTTO 
 
 It may seem strange that the man who revealed him- 
 self before many years as the author of ' A Midsummer 
 Night's Dream' — a combination of poetic fancy and 
 effective stagecraft such as antiquity had never produced, 
 such as no later age has seen or may see — should not 
 have been conscious of his true capability from the first. 
 But we cannot get over the hard facts of his chosen 
 motto, " Villa miretur vulgus, mihiflavus Apollo" and his 
 express declaration that the classical piece to which he 
 affixed it was the first heir of his invention. The 
 strangeness, however, of his preference for classical 
 verse will appear less if we bear in mind the condition 
 of the London stage when he came to it. It was very 
 different from the condition in which he left it, at the 
 moment of his proud leave-taking in ' The Tempest.' 
 Nay more, it was very different, according to the com- 
 plaints of Spenser and Drayton, from its condition about 
 the middle of Elizabeth's reign. When Spenser revisited 
 London in 1590-91, after an absence of several years in 
 Ireland, he expressed in his Tears of the Muses his sense 
 of the change that had come over the literary world, 
 and in his ninth section, " The Complaint of Thalia," he 
 deplored more particularly the decline of the drama. 
 Two years after, in 1593, Drayton devoted one of his 
 Eclogues to the same theme, complaining of these 
 " noninos of filthy ribaldry " : 
 
 Now we are subject to the beastly clowns 
 That all our mirth would utterly destroy. 
 
 This was not directed against the inimitable Tarleton, 
 who was dead, nor against Will Kempe, whom Drayton 
 elsewhere compliments. It was in part a complaint 
 that the pastoral fashion of Sidney's Arcadia was pass- 
 ing away. But other excellent things were passing away 
 likewise, such as the genuinely comic interludes, often 
 played by children, and the not less delightful morahties 
 like Everyman^ which has held so many audiences spell- 
 bound on its revival in our own day. The new taste 
 
 127 
 
"REVERSION OF OLD PLAYS" 
 
 was known among the critics as " barbarism." It is a 
 mistake to suppose that Shakespeare had ever any 
 sympathy with it, or that he tolerated it any more than 
 he was forced to do in order to earn his living. It was 
 as a champion against that "gross barbarism" that Daniel 
 greeted him in 1 594, in a punning allusion to his name, as 
 one who had wielded a pen as it had been a Spear in the 
 fight. But in his own allegory of Caliban we have the 
 best proof not only of his aversion to laxity, claptrap, 
 and indecency on the stage, the vilia of the vulgar 
 admiration, but even of his despair of ever getting rid of 
 the popular demand for them. Caliban is 
 
 A devil, a born devil, on virhose nature 
 Nurture can never stick ; on whom my pains, 
 Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost ; 
 And as with age his body uglier grows. 
 So his mind cankers, — 
 
 as if he were looking forward to the theatres of the 
 Restoration or to the music halls of this year of grace. 
 One of the most powerful of his sonnets, the 1 1 ith, 
 is upon his own ill-fortune in having to provide for the 
 public taste : 
 
 And almost thence my nature is subdued 
 To what it works in, like the dyer's hand. 
 Pity me then, and wish I were renewed. 
 
 It is a paradox, but it is true, that Shakespeare in his 
 earliest love of the Muses had no ambition to be a 
 playwright. The closing of the theatres for nearly 
 eighteen continuous months owing to plague, from 
 June 1592 to December 1593, gave him more leisure 
 from his business of player than he probably wished ; 
 but he did not occupy it in writing plays ; he occupied 
 it in producing his highly polished poems, ' Venus and 
 Adonis' and 'The Rape of Lucrece.* And yet the 
 very last successful play in London before that long 
 interruption of theatrical business, ' King Henry the 
 Sixth,' must have proved to him how easily he could 
 
 128 
 
' I HENRY VI.' 
 
 fill the house by giving his mind to dramatic composi- 
 tion. The original play (now ' i Hen. VI.') was a worth- 
 less thing, and most of its worthlessness remains in 
 Shakespeare's text to this hour. But we know from 
 Nash that it drew ten thousand spectators, or more, at 
 its several performances, which appear from Henslowe's 
 diary to have been about twice a week from ist March 
 1592 to 22nd June, when the theatres were closed; 
 and Nash makes it clear that the attraction was Talbot, 
 the terror of the French. Now it is just in those 
 Talbot scenes in rhymed verse, and in two or three 
 others in blank verse, that we recognise the hand of 
 Shakespeare, and the ground of his claiming the play 
 as his property. In the scenes between Talbot and his 
 son the composition changes abruptly to animated 
 rhymed couplets, contrasting with the dull verbiage of 
 blank verse all around them. One can imagine what had 
 happened. Reading over ,the other man's play — the 
 future author of Locrine, as I conjecture — Shakespeare 
 had seen how easily it could be improved at two or 
 three of the most effective points in the action ; accord- 
 ingly he proceeded to touch it up, and found that the 
 easiest way for himself was to turn the bombastic and 
 forced blank verse into lively and pointed rhymes, 
 which make the part of old Talbot in company with 
 young John all alive, and would have been as music to 
 the ears of the patriotic audience. It is not unlikely 
 that one attraction of the piece may have lain in the 
 coarse presentation of Joan of Arc as a sanctimonious 
 impostor and the mistress of the several French princes 
 in succession. Shakespeare passed over all these scenes 
 with his tongue in his cheek and with contempt in his 
 heart, contenting himself with having given at least 
 one redeeming touch- of English valour to the piece, 
 and leaving it for the rest to gratify the appetite of 
 Caliban. He followed the same cynical rule shortly 
 after with ' Titus Andronicus ' ; and even in his later 
 period, when he had established for all time a more 
 
 129 K 
 
"REVERSION OF OLD PLAYS" 
 
 more excellent way, he allowed "the late and much 
 admired play called Pericles," to go forth with his 
 name upon the title-page, having redeemed it from 
 worthlessness by rewriting the Marina scenes and by 
 occasional touches in the others. 
 
 The three parts of ' Henry VI.,' as they now stand, 
 are joined in a sequence, as if they had been planned 
 originally by one hand in the order in which they come. 
 But it is probable that they were all by different pens. 
 It is true that the second in the series was originally 
 called the ' The First Part of the Contention of the two 
 Famous Houses of York and Lancaster,' as if it had 
 been intended to follow with the Second Part. But it 
 is probable that the projected Second Part was never 
 written (as happened with Greene's Alphonsus and 
 with Selimus) ; at all events, what is in effect the 
 continuation of the history, ' The True Tragedie of 
 Richard, Duke of York,' appears to have been an 
 independent piece by a different author. Malone has 
 pointed out one striking historical discrepancy between 
 the two, which led him to entertain a doubt as to the 
 common authorship, although he does not conclude 
 finally against it. Without giving the grounds of my 
 opinion, I may state my conclusion that the author of 
 the ' True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of York ' was 
 the same as the author of The True Tragedie of 
 Richard the Third, and that the author of both was 
 the author of The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and 
 Perseda, namely, Thomas Kyd.^ As to the second 
 in the ' Henry Vl. ' series, ' The First Part of the Con- 
 tention,' which Dr. Johnson held to be the best of the 
 • three and Mr. Swinburne considers to have been written 
 
 1 The True Tragedie of^ Richard III. repeats a phrase of Kyd's from 
 The Spanish Tragedy which was ridiculed by Ben Jonson — " What ! 
 villain, feed'st thou me with ifs and ands ? " It contains also " foe me no 
 foes," like the " Typhon me no Typhons " of Kyd's Soliman and Per- 
 seda, which are imitated by FalstafF. Among other distinctive marks of 
 Kyd are the frequent use of the appellative " Gentles ! " and the striking 
 frequency of the exclamation " Ah ! " which occurs fifty-six times in his 
 Richard III. 
 
 130 
 
' 2 AND 3 HENRY VI.' 
 
 beyond question by Marlowe, I am inclined to defer 
 to Mr. Swinburne's judgment. But in that hypothesis 
 we are confronted with a singular boldness on the part 
 of Shakespeare in dealing with " Marlowe's mighty 
 line." 
 
 Malone has printed the second and third parts of 
 ' Henry VI. ' from the final Shakespearian text in such 
 a manner as to show all the lines that are taken un- 
 altered from the original quartos, all those that appear 
 for the first time in the folio of 1623, and all those that 
 are altered in expression in the folio from their sub- 
 stance in the quartos, the two latter classes being 
 marked respectively by asterisks and inverted commas. 
 Malone's conclusion was, that the asterisked lines, found 
 only in the folio, were Shakespeare's additions to the 
 plays by another hand, and that the lines reprinted 
 without change from the quartos were by the unknown 
 author, and none of them by Shakespeare. This hypo- 
 thesis, however, will not work. Mr. Swinburne has 
 pointed out that much of the matter which appears /or 
 the first time in the folio is just such as we would attri- 
 bute to the other pen but not to Shakespeare. At the 
 same time it is clear from such passages in the quartos 
 as " She-wolf of France," and " What, will the aspiring 
 blood of Lancaster sink in the ground ? " that Shake- 
 speare had been at work upon the texts before they 
 were printed at all. The best hypothesis seems to be, 
 that he had the author's manuscript play before him ; 
 that he drew his pen through a good many lines and 
 sequences of lines (nearly all those that are asterisked 
 in Malone's text) as redundant or bombastic, that he 
 inserted a few passages in place of some struck out, and 
 even rewrote whole scenes, such as the Fourth Scene of 
 Act I. of ' The True Tragedie ' (' 3 Hen. VI.'). From 
 the MS. copies thus deleted and amended the quartos 
 were composed. Those printed texts, however, must 
 have been revised, probably by Shakespeare himself at 
 his leisure afterwards, in all the passages printed by 
 
 131 
 
"REVERSION OF OLD PLAYS" 
 
 Malone with inverted commas (such as the deathbed 
 scene of Cardinal Beaufort), which are much more 
 numerous in ' The First Part of the Contention ' than 
 in ' The True Tragedie.' Lastly, when the two plays 
 came to be printed in the folio of 1623 as * 2 Hen. VI.' 
 and ' 3 Hen. VI.,' all the passages deleted from the 
 original manuscripts were restored, falling naturally 
 into their places as if they had been merely struck out 
 of the MS. as redundant, proving, indeed, in many 
 instances that they are really redundant and might be 
 omitted without loss to the sense, although they are 
 never at variance with the sense. 
 
 If this had been Shakespeare's treatment of the work 
 of established writers for the stage when it was offered 
 to a theatrical manager, one can understand why 
 Greene should have written so angrily about him in the 
 autumn of 1592. We know that his rhyming Talbot 
 scenes in ' King Henry the Sixth ' (afterwards ' i Hen. 
 VI.') had secured in the preceding summer an enviable 
 popularity for that piece, which would have fallen below 
 mediocrity without them. His manner was to come in 
 at the most telling places of the action, guided by his 
 knowledge of stage-effect, and to leave the mark of his 
 genius upon these, thus scoring a distinguished success 
 without having had to waste his energies and fatigue 
 his imagination by the construction of a plot, and by 
 keeping the dialogue going continuously through all 
 the action, lively and dull alike. Moreover, he 
 ventured to treat the elevated or inflated blank verse of 
 famous playwrights, let us say Marlowe and Kyd, 
 perhaps Greene himself, with the odious blue pencil. 
 Greene did not live to see the sequel in the folio of 
 1623 (nor indeed did Shakespeare himself) ; but it 
 would have been doubly galling to find the excised 
 passages replaced in the text as Shakespeare's own ; such 
 lines, for example, as those in ' 2 Hen. VI.' which Mr. 
 Swinburne takes to be so peculiarly in Marlowe's best 
 manner : 
 
 132 
 
SHAKE-SCENE AND CO. 
 
 The gaudy, blabbing and remorseful day 
 
 Is crept into the bosom of the sea ; 
 
 And now loud-howling wolves arouse the jades 
 
 That drag the tragic melancholy night ; 
 
 Who with their drowsy, slow, and flagging wings 
 
 Clip dead men's graves, and from their misty jaws 
 
 Breathe foul contagious darkness in the air. 
 
 This is put into the mouth of a shipmaster who has 
 just landed near Dover from a ship in the Downs ; so 
 that one can hardly wonder at the blue pencil going 
 through it. The three playwrights whom Greene 
 associates with himself in this grievance against Shake- 
 speare and another (whom Chettle struck out from the 
 libel before printing it) are usually taken to be 
 Marlowe (" thou famous gracer of tragedians "), Lodge 
 ("young Juvenal," "sweet boy"), and Peele ("no less 
 deserving than the other two, in some things rarer, in 
 nothing inferior "). As to the identification of Lodge, 
 he was thirty-five at the time, and could hardly have 
 been called a " sweet boy " : the description suits Nash 
 better, who was ten or twelve years younger than Lodge, 
 and is called " gallant young Juvenal " by Meres in 1 598. 
 Greene says that young Juvenal had quite lately 
 ("lastly") written a comedy in conjunction with 
 himself; and that I take to have been 'The Taming 
 of a Shrew,' probably the only Shakespearian piece to 
 which Greene or Nash had any claim. As to the 
 identification of Marlowe, he was of course a famous 
 gracer of tragedians, inasmuch as his Jew of Malta and 
 Tamburlaine were favourite parts with leading actors ; 
 and he was also a freethinker, as Greene reprovingly 
 reminds his friend. But Kyd also was a famous gracer 
 of tragedians in respect of his Hieronimo (" Jeronimo ") 
 in The Spanish Tragedy, a part which was quite as much 
 the ambition of a tragedian as any of Marlowe's ; 
 and he was included with Marlowe in 1593 in a legal 
 process for his so-called " atheism " (it was really 
 Unitarianism). I do not know why George Peele is 
 identified with the third playwright, who is warned to 
 
 133 
 
"REVERSION OF OLD PLAYS" 
 
 have nothing to do with Shakespeare and Co., unless 
 it be that Greene adjures him " by sweet St. George." 
 It may be that these usual identifications are right, with 
 the exception of Lodge, who should almost certainly be 
 replaced by Nash. But even if that be so, it should 
 not mean that those four, Greene, Marlowe, Nash, and 
 Peele, were the only playwrights, or even the chief, 
 whose work passed under the name of Shakespeare in 
 after years, having been merely dressed for the stage 
 by the latter. There could have been very little of 
 Greene's own to which he did not affix his name, as he 
 was wont to do with unusual care. Also Marlowe's 
 short career is fairly well filled with some half-dozen 
 tragedies printed with his name. On the other hand, 
 Kyd, who died in the year after Marlowe, and was six 
 years his senior, has not a single play to his name, not 
 even the famous Spanish Tragedy, until the posthumous 
 Cornelia of 1594, which was a translation from the 
 French of Garnier. Yet he was known as a famous 
 playwright ; he is called "famous Kyd" by Hey wood 
 in 1634, more than a generation after his death ; and 
 by Ben Jonson, in his appreciation of Shakespeare, 
 "sporting Kyd," is joined with Marlowe and Lyly 
 in the triad which Shakespeare " did far outshine." 
 
 We have therefore to look for Kyd's work, the 
 ground of his living and posthumous fame, amongst 
 anonymous plays. The Spanish Tragedy was certainly 
 his ; almost equally certain is it that Soliman and 
 Perseda was his, as it is an expansion, with two new 
 comic parts of Basilisco and Piston, of the play within 
 the play in The Spanish Tragedy. But there is a more 
 famous play than either of those, although it does not 
 appear ever to have been printed, the original Hamlet's 
 Revenge, which was almost certainly Kyd's, as it appears 
 to have been constructed upon the same lines as The 
 Spanish Tragedy (the revenge motive, a ghost, and a 
 play within the play). Moreover, in Shakespeare's own 
 play-scene in ' Hamlet ' there are two or three reminis- 
 
 134 
 
THOMAS KYD 
 
 cences of Kyd's extant work ; and there would have 
 been more if we could have searched the text of his 
 Hamlet. In the player king's speech, 
 
 Full thirty times hath Phoebus cart gone round 
 Neptune's salt wash and Tellus' orbed ground, 
 
 we have a parody of what was common enough in the 
 plays of the time, but more especially of Kyd's meta- 
 phorical manner in such lines as : 
 
 Ere Sol had slept three nights in Thetis' lap 
 And stall'd his smoking chariot in her flood.^ 
 
 Again Hamlet's doggerel at the end of the " Murder of 
 Gonzago " : 
 
 For if the king like not the comedy. 
 Why then, belike, he likes it not perdy, 
 
 is a burlesque of Hieronimo's remark on the occasion of 
 his own mouse-trap play : 
 
 And if the world like not this tragedy, 
 Hard is the hap of old Jeronymy. 
 
 Thirdly, Hamlet's mock-tragic line " The croaking 
 raven doth bellow for revenge " is a reminiscence of 
 
 The screeking raven sits croaking for revenge, 
 Whole heads of beasts come bellowing for revenge, 
 
 in The True Tragedie of Richard the Third, which can be 
 guessed by several idiosyncracies of expression to be by 
 the author of The Spanish Tragedy and of Soliman and 
 Perseda. Also in rewriting the part of Christopher 
 Sly in the induction to ' The Taming of a Shrew,' Shake- 
 speare must have been thinking of Kyd ; for he gives 
 to Sly no fewer than three phrases in a short space 
 which were Kyd's, having passed into jokes owing to 
 their singularity. 
 
 1 In one of the opening scenes of Selimus which Kyd may have written 
 (see next section), there is an even closer parallel : 
 
 Twice fifteen times hath fair Latona's son 
 Walked about the world with his great light. 
 
" REVERSION OF OLD PLAYS " 
 
 But the most probable of Shakespeare's reminiscences 
 of Kyd, not less interesting than his reminiscences of the 
 famous clown Dick Tarleton as Yorick, is the Tom o' 
 Bedlam, or Poor Tom of ' King Lear.' When Edgar 
 affects lunacy, he has to follow some consistent role, 
 which has nothing to do, of course, with his own 
 antecedents ; his talk is the well-feigned rambling of a 
 mind diseased, constructed by Shakespeare with moral 
 rather than medical realism, appropriately to the un- 
 fortunate life of some one known to him, but not at all 
 appropriately to Edgar's former life. His original, I 
 believe, was poor Tom Kyd. He was the son of a 
 respectable scrivener in London, well educated at 
 Merchant Taylors' School, and brought up to his father's 
 business of a notary, which he deserted for literature 
 against his father's wish ; as Nash said in 1589, he " left 
 the trade of Noverint." It is known from his own 
 statement to Lord Keeper Puckering that he entered the 
 service of a certain lord about the year 1590-91, and 
 remained therein nearly three years, until he was 
 arrested, on 12th May 1593, on suspicion of being 
 guilty of " a libell that concerned the State." Whether 
 it be the same affair or not, it appears from extant 
 papers that he was proceeded against, along with 
 Marlowe, on a charge of "atheism." Marlowe escaped 
 the process by being killed in a tavern quarrel in June 
 1593, but there is some reason to think that Kyd 
 suffered imprisonment in Bridewell, and that he was 
 even put to the torture. The last we hear of him, 
 before his death in December 1594, is from his own 
 pathetic dedication of Cornelia to the Countess of 
 Sussex : " Having no leisure, most noble lady, but such 
 as evermore is travailed with the afflictions of the mind, 
 than which the world affords no greater misery, it may 
 be wondered at by some how I durst undertake a 
 matter of this moment, which both requireth cunning, 
 rest, and opportunity." The work was a translation 
 from the French ; but at one place (as Mr. Boas has 
 
 136 
 
THOMAS KYD 
 
 shown) he interpolates eighteen lines of his own, includ- 
 ing these five : 
 
 Time past, with me that am to tears converted, 
 Whose mournful passions dull the morning's eyes. 
 Whose sweetest sleeps are turned to fearful dreams, 
 And whose first fortunes fill'd with all distress. 
 Afford no hope of future happiness 
 
 I think it is hardly doubtful that poor Kyd's 
 " afflictions of the mind " were a true disease of 
 melancholia, that his mind had become unhinged, 
 perhaps in his imprisonment of 1593, and that he 
 wrote his last work in lucid intervals after his release. 
 He died before it was printed ; and it has been 
 ascertained by the industry of Herr Schick, that his 
 mother, acting on behalf of her husband, renounced the 
 administration of his goods " for divers causes and 
 considerations," according to an entry of 30th December 
 1594 in the Probate and Administration Act Book of 
 the Archdeaconry of London. I am inclined to suspect 
 that his melancholia was suicidal, and that he had 
 taken his own life. 
 
 Now, let us see how all this suits Poor Tom in 
 ' King Lear ' : 
 
 Away ! the foul fiend follows me ! 
 
 " Through the sharp hawthorn blows the cold wind." 
 
 Hum ! go to thy cold bed and warm thee. 
 
 The third line is Kyd's much-ridiculed "naked bed " in 
 Jeronimo's speech : 
 
 What outcries pluck me from my naked bed. 
 And chill my throbbing heart with trembling care, 
 
 Shakespeare having used it already in the mouth of Sly, 
 the tinker : " Go by, Jeronimy : go to thy cold bed 
 and warm thee." The best known ballad of the 
 Hawthorn Tree was by Drayton (1593), but there 
 may have been another by Kyd. 
 
 Edgar goes on : " Who gives anything to poor Tom ! 
 
 137 
 
"REVERSION OF OLD PLAYS" 
 
 whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through 
 flame, and through ford and whirlpool, o'er bog and quag- 
 mire ; that hath laid knives under his pillow, and halters 
 in his pew ; set ratsbane by his porridge " — the haunting 
 thought of suicide in the mind of a melancholic. 
 Again, " Take heed of the foul fiend ; obey thy parents ; 
 keep thy word justly ; swear not ; commit not with 
 man's sworn spouse ; set not thy sweet heart on proud 
 array." Lear asks him, " What hast thou been ? " and 
 Poor Tom answers, " ^ serving man, proud in heart 
 and mind, that curled my hair, wore gloves in my cap," 
 and so on to the end of that famous catalogue of follies. 
 Then comes an enumeration of his prison and other 
 miseries, ending with a quotation : 
 
 But rats and mice and such small deer 
 Have been Tom's food for seven long year. 
 
 The quotation is from the ballad of Sir Bevis of 
 Southampton, where his suff^erings in a Saracen dungeon 
 are described. At this point the " sullen and assumed 
 humour of Tom of Bedlam " passes away from the real 
 experiences of Tom Kyd ; which it appears to me to 
 have followed consistently hitherto, on the assumption 
 that Kyd had disobeyed his parents, had become a 
 serving man in the train of a noble, had led a gay life, 
 had suffered imprisonment, and had fallen into melan- 
 choly madness and been haunted with the thought of 
 suicide. It is in keeping with Shakespeare's introduc- 
 tion of his other literary contemporaries on his stage 
 that he keeps the literary pursuits entirely out of 
 sight.^ 
 
 1 The next ballad quotation by Poor Tom is the famous "Childe 
 Rowland to the dark tower .came," which forms the subject of one of 
 Robert Browning's most subtle intuitions. Although it is foreign to my 
 present purpose, I cannot miss the chance of stating how it strikes me. 
 The lunatic's transition from Sir Bevis in his Saracen dungeon to Childe 
 Rowland is natural enough, inasmuch as Rowland and Bevis were both 
 paladins of Charlemagne. The first line of the ballad supposed to be 
 quoted has never been found : 
 
 138 
 
THOMAS KYD 
 
 Poor Tom is one of the most memory-haunting 
 figures in all Shakespeare's plays, only inferior in 
 pathos to the mad Ophelia herself; and in the hypothesis 
 that Tom Kyd was the original of him, I infer that the 
 dramatic treatment indicates a very tender feeling on 
 Shakespeare's part for the memory of that unhappy 
 playwright. Mr. Boas, in his edition of Kyd, has 
 indicated, without exaggeration, as I think, how much 
 Shakespeare must have owed to Kyd's Hamlet in the 
 way of effective situations ; and I believe that it was to 
 Kyd, as the author of The Troublesome Raigne, that 
 he owed the main lines of the grand character Faulcon- 
 bridge in ' King John,' as well as the opening idea of 
 Gloster's great speech : 
 
 What, will the aspiring blood of Lancaster 
 
 Sink in the ground ? I thought it would have mounted — 
 
 Childe Rowland to the dark tower came. 
 His word was still, Fie, foh, and fum, 
 I smell the blood of a British man. 
 
 It has been thought unlikely that the chivalrous knight should thirst for 
 the blood of a British man ; and it has been proposed to interpolate a 
 second line, supposed missing, which introduces an ogre as the subject of 
 the blood-thirsty predicate : 
 
 The giant roared, and out he ran ; 
 
 His word was still, Fie, foh, and fum, etc. 
 
 Of course Poor Tom was mad, and may be excused for having omitted a 
 line, so as to make Rowland himself the smeller of blood. But we may 
 be sure that Shakespeare had method in his madness, and that the enigma 
 had a meaning to himself as it stands ; that is to say, Childe Rowland 
 comes to the dark tower and smells the blood of a British man within. 
 Rowland, I conceive, is Shakespeare himself, the same Rowland, or 
 Orlando, as in ' As You Like It ' ; while the " British " man whose blood 
 he smelled is the Oliver of that comedy (see later), the unnatural brother of 
 Orlando, the exact counterpart of the unnatural brother Antonio in 'The 
 Tempest,' Lord Southampton, who had been a prisoner in the dark Tower 
 from February 1601 until April 1603, and owed his release to the prompt 
 clemency of King James (by whose order an Englishman was henceforth 
 to be a British man). Lord Southampton in his gallant youth was com- 
 pared to Sir Bevis of Southampton, and that seems to me to have been Poor 
 Tom's drift in rambling on from Sir Bevis's "rats and mice and such 
 small deer," to Childe Rowland and "fie, foh, fum." Browning has 
 conceived the dark tower far otherwise, and I am painfully aware that 
 my matter-of-fact association of ideas is unattractive, if not repulsive, in 
 comparison. 
 
 139 
 
« REVERSION OF OLD PLAYS " 
 
 which is Kyd's " Blood sprinkled springs," the paraphrase 
 of the Lancastrian motto, Cresce cruor, sanguis satietur 
 sanguine^ in the induction to The True Tragedie of 
 Richard III. If there were these and other obligations 
 on the one side, it is pleasing to think that Shakespeare had 
 written for Kyd certain comic scenes, which have been 
 pronounced by two German critics to be not in Kyd's 
 manner, and indeed too good for him. They occur in 
 the play Soliman and Perseda, which was entered for 
 copyright on 22nd November 1592. In this play Kyd 
 works up the materials which he had already used in 
 the subordinate play in his Spanish Tragedy, having 
 taken them from a prose work by Wotton, who took 
 them from the French. But the independent drama 
 upon them is enriched by an original and very prominent 
 comic element, the two characters Piston and Basilisco.-* 
 Herr Schroer and Herr Schick are agreed that this 
 comedy is by a finer hand than Kyd's, the latter 
 suggesting Peele. I do not know enough of Peele's 
 genius to judge, but I am quite sure that Basilisco Is 
 the first draft of Shakespeare's Pistol and ParoUes. 
 Whoever wrote the part of Basilisco drew it from the 
 life. It is possible that Kyd knew the original, Barnabe 
 Barnes, whose actual cowardice in Essex's expedition to 
 Normandy in 1591, and his boasted valour, were matter 
 of common talk at the time when Soliman and 
 Perseda was under hand. But I shall show in several 
 places that Shakespeare knew him well ; and in the next 
 section I shall give reasons for believing that it was 
 Barnes himself who wrote the historical play afterwards 
 called the ' First Part of Henry VI.,' on his return from 
 the seat of war. 
 
 These are roundabout reasons for concluding that 
 Kyd had been more closely associated with Shakespeare 
 
 ' In rewriting the old Troublesome Raigne of John, Shakespeare 
 introduced at I. i. 244 a reference to the Basilisco of Kyd's Soliman, using, 
 as I believe, a character which he had given to Kyd in order to illustrate a 
 passage which he was adapting^oOT Kyd. 
 
 140 
 
VARIOUS POSSIBLE AUTHORS 
 
 than Greene, or Marlowe, or Peele, or Nash ; but in 
 the nature of the case any reasons given for one view 
 or another can hardly be other than circuitous. Who- 
 ever has read the abundant speculations upon this early 
 period of Shakespeare's work for the stage, a period to 
 which every Shakespearian will recur time after time 
 with undiminished interest in the problem, must have 
 remarked how subjective the several points of view 
 have been, and perhaps noticed also how his own im- 
 pressions have varied from time to time. So many 
 anonymous plays, and so many possible authors for 
 them ! To state and criticise all the several arguments 
 as to the authorship of each of the three parts of 
 ' Henry VI.,' the old ' King John,' the old ' Taming of 
 a Shrew,' and ' Titus Andronicus ' (to say nothing for 
 the present of 'Pericles '), would require a separate 
 volume ; and to explain fully the grounds of the 
 writer's own belief would need an inordinate amount of 
 space for citation of passages. I must pass from the 
 subject with a summary statement of opinion. Kyd 
 was the original author of three plays which eventually 
 passed as Shakespeare's after he had rewritten them 
 either wholly or in part : ' The Troublesome Raigne of 
 John King of England' (in two parts, quarto, 1591) ; 
 ' The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of York ' 
 (quarto, 1594) ; and 'Titus Andronicus.' As to the 
 last, there is a question whether Kyd's play was not 
 the earlier form of the same story (still preserved in a 
 German version) which Henslowe enters, on nth 
 April 1592, under the name of Tittus and Vespacia ; 
 while the later form, entered by Henslowe under the 
 name Tittus and Ondronicus on 28th January 1594, 
 would have been adapted from Kyd's by an intermediate 
 hand (probably Barnabe Barnes, the author of Locrine), 
 before Shakespeare set to work upon the text. I take 
 Barnes to have been the author of ' King Henry the 
 Sixth' (1592), which was not printed until the folio of 
 1623 as 'I Hen. VI.'; the language, except in the 
 
 141 
 
"REVERSION OF OLD PLAYS" 
 
 Shakespearian passages, Act IL Scene iv., Act IV, Scenes 
 v.-vii., and Act V. Scene v. (the last scene), is the 
 verbiage of ParoUes ; and the odious exhibition of the 
 Maid of Orleans and of the English nobles in their 
 talk about her and treatment of her, is such as Barnes's 
 imagination might have conceived. 'The First Part 
 of the Contention,' the future * 2 Hen. VI.,' I assume 
 with good judges to have been the work of Marlowe, 
 perhaps in collaboration with one or more of his friends. 
 There remains the old ' Taming of a Shrew,' a comedy 
 of remarkable originality and spirit, which Shakespeare 
 rewrote entirely, so as not to leave a single line of the 
 original standing, but without altering the plot except 
 to simplify it and to change the scene from ancient 
 Athens to modern Padua. I believe it to have been 
 the comedy referred to by Greene as having been lately 
 (1592) written by himself along with "young Juvenal," 
 meaning Nash. Critics show in it some striking 
 resemblances of thought and expression to Greene's 
 undoubted work ; while the chorus -like part of the 
 drunken tinker, Christopher Sly, in whose presence and 
 for whose behoof the comedy is played by the strolling 
 actors, is exactly in the manner of Nash's Summers Last 
 Will and Testament (acted in 1592), in which Will 
 Summer, jester to Henry VIII., sits through the perform- 
 ance of a play and passes comic remarks upon the action 
 and the actors from point to point. The dual authorship 
 would have been a reason why it was printed anony- 
 mously ; if it had been all Greene's he would probably 
 have put his name to it. Shakespeare left out the part 
 of Sly, as drunken chorus, from the body of the play ; 
 but it may be read in the text of Pope, who understood 
 so little the relation between the old 'Taming of a 
 Shrew ' and Shakespeare's ' Taming of the Shrew ' as 
 to amend the authentic text of the latter from that of 
 the former. 
 
 Lastly, as to Shakespeare's claims to be the author 
 of these old pieces. They were all anonymous until 
 
 143 
 
A PURCHASED INTEREST 
 
 they appeared in the folio edition of his works seven 
 years after his death. But, in the list of twelve plays 
 which he gave to Meres for his literary gossip in the 
 autumn of 1598, he included 'King John' and 'Titus 
 Andronicus,' as well as ' Love's Labour's Won,' under 
 which appropriate title he meant at that time to disguise 
 the identity of ' The Taming of a Shrew.' ^ It is note- 
 worthy, however, that he did not give to Meres the 
 names of any of the three Henry VI. plays ; and it may 
 be inferred from their omission that he did not intend 
 at that time to claim any right to them. It is nearly 
 certain that he had bought the whole rights to the old 
 ' King John,' ' Taming of a Shrew,' ' First Part of the 
 Contention,' and ' True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of 
 York ' ; for when it came to copyrightijig the several 
 thirty-six plays for the folio of 1623, those four were 
 treated as if the copyright had been already secured, 
 although none of them hitherto had been published in 
 the true Shakespearian text : they had been reprinted 
 time after time in their original forms, and probably 
 sold to Shakespeare's account. It must have been this 
 dealing in other men's plays for cash that Ben Jonson 
 had in mind in his splenetic outburst of 1601 against 
 Shakespeare as a literary broker : 
 
 At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean, 
 Buy the reversion of old plays. 
 
 1 This suggestion was made first by G. L. Craik, in his 1859 edition of 
 ' Julius Caesar.' The more closely it is examined, especially in a compari- 
 son of the old play with the new, the more apt does it appear. Petruchio 
 wins love's labour in the very practical form of winning a large wager of 
 gold, through his newly-tamed wife's unexpected obedience. The wooer 
 of one of Kate's sisters remarks that " all my labour's lost," because the 
 father insisted upon marrying the shrew of the family first, a condition 
 which was not fiflfiUed until the boldness and cleverness of Petruchio suc- 
 ceeded where others had failed. On the other hand, there are insuperable 
 objections to the theory that ' Love's Labour's Won ' was a name intended 
 at one time for 'All's Well that Ends Well.' There is every reason why 
 that should have been always the name of that play, the proverb occurring 
 at least twice in the text. But the motive for disguising the old 'Taming 
 of a Shrew ' under a new name is obvious, although fortunately the inten- 
 tJgB was not persisted in. 
 
 143 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 Shakespeare's literary " devil " — barnabe 
 
 BARNES 
 
 In Greene's often- cited attack upon Shakespeare in 
 1592, as one who was "in his own conceit the only 
 Shake-scene in a country," he coupled him with an 
 associate, whom he characterised in such abusive terms 
 that Chettle, in preparing Greene's tract for the press, 
 struck out the reference as libellous. Chettle was 
 called upon by Shakespeare to apologise for what he 
 had printed about him, which he did at once and hand- 
 somely, expressing his regret that he had not struck out 
 the libel upon the one as well as the other. The other, 
 he explained, was a person whom he did not know, and 
 had no wish to know, but he " reverenced his learning." 
 This excludes any of Shakespeare's fellow-actors, or a 
 theatrical proprietor, such as Henslowe, who was an 
 uneducated man. It has been taken usually to mean 
 Marlowe (by Dyce and others), which appears to me to 
 be impossible, inasmuch as Marlowe is assumed by the 
 same critics to have been one of the three friends of 
 Greene who are cautioned in a direct personal address to 
 have nothing more to do with Shake-scene and Co. 
 It was because Chettle " reverenced his learning " that 
 he had spared the man who was in the same condemna- 
 tion with Shakespeare ; and, by implication, it was 
 because the latter was not a gentleman of education 
 that he had not been treated with the same considera- 
 tion. Shakespeare, then, was associated in the mind of 
 
 144 
 
SHAKE-SCENE AND ANOTHER 
 
 Greene with some person of learning, who was not less 
 obnoxious than the Johannes factotum of the playhouse 
 on account of adapting or copying the " admired inven- 
 tions " of himself and his three playwright friends. It 
 must be a matter of regret to posterity that Chettle 
 deleted the passage referring to Shakespeare's associate, 
 for it would almost certainly have revealed an identity 
 as clearly as Shake-scene does, Chettle himself being 
 aware who was meant. I have given reasons in the 
 last section for believing that Kyd was associated closely 
 with Shakespeare at that date ; but it is hardly con- 
 ceivable that Greene should have included a genuine 
 and established playwright like Kyd in his plural of 
 "burrs," "puppets," "antics," apes," "rude grooms," 
 " buckram gentlemen," " peasants," and " painted 
 monsters." Kyd may not have been one of Greene's 
 boon companions ; but we know from documents 
 that he got into trouble the year after on account of 
 his supposed adherence to Marlowe's freethinking or 
 " Machiavellian " principles, which are the very matter 
 of Greene's own penitence in this tract. I am therefore 
 inclined to look in another direction than Marlowe or 
 Kyd for the unknown partner of Shake-scene and Co. 
 
 The literary character whom I shall have to associate 
 closely with Shakespeare in several places of the sequel 
 is a man whose name is now well-nigh forgotten, Barnabe 
 Barnes. He was the acknowledged author of two 
 volumes of lyrical verse, in 1593 and 1595, of a prose 
 treatise in 1606, and of a tragedy in 1607. He became 
 well known, even notorious, In his day, having been 
 handled very freely, under his name, by Nash in his 
 pamphlets upon Gabriel Harvey, and by Campion in 
 two of his collections of Epigrams. But there is nowhere 
 a single word or hint to connect him with Shakespeare. 
 The evidence is wholly constructive, and is so dependent 
 one part upon another that it can hardly be stated at 
 any one place without seeming to beg the question 
 which underlies the whole. The nearest contact 
 
 145 L 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 between him and Shakespeare, which is hardly proble- 
 matical, was the production of his tragedy, The Divifs 
 Charter (on the crimes of the Borgias) by the players 
 of the Globe Theatre on Candlemas night, 1607, 
 upon King James's private stage at Whitehall, five 
 weeks after the original production of ' King Lear ' 
 upon the same stage and by the same company. The 
 juxtaposition is as singular as I believe the personal 
 relations between the respective authors to have been. 
 His part in Shakespeare's life is not a determining one, 
 as Southampton's may be said to have been ; he might 
 indeed be omitted from it altogether without the loss 
 of much more than the original study for Pistol and 
 ParoUes ; all the literary help that the dramatist ever 
 got from him might easily have come from any other 
 source, and might have remained always anonymous, 
 so unessential is it to his real merit. It is the strange- 
 ness of the connection that makes it, as I think, interest- 
 ing : — a literary assistant whom he used also for a comic 
 model, an original playwright whose plots are full of 
 horrors and all unnaturalness, an original poet whose 
 style is verbiage. 
 
 The evidence connecting Barnes with Shakespeare 
 groups itself around the well-known tragedy of Locrine^ 
 which becomes as it were the keystone of an arch of 
 probabilities. If the authorship of Locrine can be 
 brought home to him, then much more becomes clear 
 at once. The style of Locrine is the style of Pistol 
 and ParoUes ; it is a peculiar kind of verbiage, often 
 meaningless and nonsensical, mere sound and fury 
 signifying nothing, which hardly another of the many 
 Elizabethan playwrights, with all their bombast, was 
 insincere enough, or unreal enough, to practice. 
 Amongst all that great company of writers there was 
 only one ParoUes. Secondly, the plot of Locrine 
 is melodrama of a peculiar kind, ghastly horrors and 
 impossible pathos, which resembles most the construc- 
 tion of Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy, but without Kyd's 
 
 146 
 
THE AUTHOR OF LOCRINE 
 
 ingenuous simplicity : it is sui simile, like nothing but 
 itself, as we find it again in 'Titus Andronicus' and 
 Selimus, Emperor of the Turks, as well as in certain 
 scenes of 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre.' A couplet at the 
 end of Selimus, by another hand than the author's, 
 and with a twinkle of the true Shakespearian fun, hits 
 off this kind of tragedy neatly : 
 
 If this first part, gentles, likes you well, 
 The second part shall greater murthers tell. 
 
 Locrine was entered for copyright on the 20th of 
 July 1594, and published towards the end of 1595 — 
 without an author's name, but with the intimation that 
 it was " newly set foorth, overseene and corrected, by 
 W. S." There was, of course, only one W. S. whose 
 name would then have been any recommendation to a 
 play. On the strength of Shakespeare's initials, this 
 astonishing tragedy was included, along with ' Pericles ' 
 and five others, as the work of Shakespeare in the third 
 folio, the Restoration edition of 1664, and is still 
 catalogued among the works " attributed to Shake- 
 speare." Apart from the internal evidence, the original 
 title-page makes it quite clear, by the correct use of the 
 comma, that W. S. had merely overseen the work. On 
 examining it, one finds that he had overseen it with 
 huge contempt and audacity. He read through the 
 first Act until he came to the entrance of Strumbo, the 
 comic character. Strumbo is a cobbler of Caithness 
 (the geography being that of Holinshed's legendary 
 chronicles of our island, north and south), who had 
 been clumsily copied from the famous Tarleton's Derick 
 in the old play of Prince Hal. The original first comic 
 scene appears to have been occupied with Strumbo's 
 wooing of his first love Dorothy, and was probably in 
 the same gross vein as the wooing of his second love 
 Margery, in the third Act. Shakespeare revised only 
 the first comic scene, which he rewrote by turning the 
 cobbler Strumbo, for the nonce, into a caricature of the 
 
 147 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 author, the same person whom he caricatured after- 
 wards, and at greater length, as Don Armado in ' Love's 
 Labour's Lost.' The wooing of Dorothy becomes 
 almost identical with the wooing of the wench Jacque- 
 netta. I must refer the reader to the full text of both, 
 and cite only a sentence or two from the love-letter of 
 the cobbler, which will show that Shakespeare had 
 calmly changed him into a gentleman who signs himself 
 Signior Strumbo : *' So it is. Mistress Dorothy, and the 
 sole essence of my soul, that the little sparkles of 
 affection kindled in me towards your sweet self, hath 
 now increased to a great flame, and will, ere it be long, 
 consume my poor heart, except you with the pleasant 
 water of your secret fountain quench the furious heat 
 of the same. Alas ! I am a gentleman of good fame 
 and name, majestical, in 'parel comley, in gait portly," 
 etc. This is Barnes, the author himself ! The "pleasant 
 water of your secret fountain " is a refined travesty of 
 the figure of speech in Barnes's notorious Aquarius 
 sonnet in the series on the Signs of the Zodiac in his 
 first volume of poems (1593), which Campion made 
 the subject of a witty Latin epigram (1595) and Marston 
 the object of his contemptuous satire ( 1 599). 
 
 Shakespeare left his mark upon Locrine in the 
 second scene of the first Act, and nowhere else ; it is 
 one of the merriest of his merry jests, and the most 
 audacious, because he made fun of the author in his 
 own gloomy tragedy. It is quite in keeping with all 
 that we know of Barnabe Barnes that he should have 
 been content to print this, glorying in his own ridicule, 
 as Pistol and ParoUes glory in their shame. 
 
 The tragic love-scenes of Locrine concern Elstred, 
 the mistress of the legendary British king Locrine, and 
 are based upon Lodge's poem upon her, which was 
 published the year before (1593). The military ex- 
 cursions and alarums, with the bombastic speeches of 
 King Brutus and his sons, and of Humber, king of 
 the Scythians, are taken from Holinshed, of whose 
 
 148 
 
THE AUTHOR OF SELIMUS 
 
 Chronicles Barnes was a most diligent student. In 
 Holinshed also he found the materials for King Leir, 
 a history (not a tragedy as in Shakespeare's play) which 
 was performed twice at Henslowe's theatre in April 
 1594, and entered for copyright in May of that year, 
 but was not printed until 1605, when the great 'King 
 Lear ' was imminent. I ascribe this humdrum piece to 
 Barnes on various internal grounds, and not least upon 
 the ground that Lear himself, Cordelia, and the faithful 
 Lord Perillus (who corresponds with Kent) are all 
 made to express the pious sentiments which are dis- 
 tinctive of Barnes in his second phase, the Centurie of 
 Spiritual Sonnets, published in the next year (1595). 
 The other plays which I would ascribe to him in 
 greater part include the two afterwards claimed by 
 Shakespeare by reason of his embellishments upon them, 
 ' Titus Andronicus ' and the ' First Part of Henry VL' 
 (which might have been called ' Joan of Arc '), as well 
 as ' Pericles ' (which bore Shakespeare's name on the 
 quartos, but was not included in the two first folios of 
 his works) and Selimus, Emperor of the Turks, which 
 was printed by Creede, the printer of Locrine, anony- 
 mously in 1594. The last has lately been " reclaimed " 
 for Greene, and reprinted as his in a popular series, 
 upon what appears to me the slightest of critical grounds. 
 Greene could never have written nonsensical verbiage, 
 such as the figure of the ship 
 
 Whom waves do toss one way and winds another ; 
 
 nor the poor imitation of Marlowe in the speech by 
 Bajazet : 
 
 Ah, Aga, Bajazet fain would speak to thee, 
 But sudden sorrow eateth up my words. 
 Bajazet, Aga, fain would weep for thee, 
 But cruel sorrow drieth up my tears. 
 Bajazet, Aga, fain would die for thee. 
 But grief hath weakened my poor aged hands. 
 
 This is matched only by that precious morsel which 
 
 149 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 Shakespeare has left standing in his revision of ' Titus 
 Andronicus,' in pure love of a joke : 
 
 Boy. O grandsire, grandsire ! even with all my heart 
 Would I were dead, so you did live again ! — 
 O Lord, I cannot speak to him for weeping : 
 My tears will choke me, if I ope my mouth. 
 
 Kyd sometimes comes near to this contradiction-in- 
 terms manner, as in Jeronimo's famous " naked bed " ; 
 but while he makes an occasional ingenuous slip, Barnes 
 can hardly ever " keep his eye on the object," but is the 
 constant victim of verbiage. Pistol's " his heart is 
 fracted and corroborate " when his master FalstafF was 
 dying, is a classical instance of the contradiction-in- 
 terms style. Selimus has close affinities with 'Titus 
 Andronicus ' also in its bloody mutilations and in its 
 Machiavellian principles. However, the Machiavellian 
 passages are strikingly good, especially the speech in 
 answer to the line " There is a hell and a revenging 
 God," which begins : 
 
 Tush, Sinam, these are school conditions. 
 
 These, and all that there is excellent in Selimus are in 
 the first part of it, which is marked also by the same 
 frequent lapse into rhyme (of various measures) that we 
 find in The Troublesome Raigne of John. It is, indeed, 
 not improbable that the hand of Kyd is to be traced both 
 in ' Titus Andronicus ' and in Selimus, and that Barnes 
 adapted the former from its earlier form of Titus and 
 Vespasia, produced on Henslowe's stage in April 1592, 
 and completed the latter after Kyd had been obliged to 
 give it up through imprisonment (on account of those 
 very Machiavellian principles) and subsequent illness. 
 At all events, after about the 600th line, Selimus 
 degenerates greatly, losing the lively rhymed passages, 
 falling into the same kind of verbiage as in Locrine, 
 and introducing at least two specific things which show 
 the hand of Barnes. The first of these, at line 729, 
 
 150 
 
THE AUTHOR OF SELIMUS 
 
 is a speech by Acomat, which is as nearly as possible 
 Barnes's own account of himself in his first lyrical 
 volume, Parthenophil and Parthenope, a profession of 
 martial spirit grafted upon precocious sensuality for 
 which he was ridiculed as a braggart for the rest of his 
 life: 
 
 Perhaps you wonder why prince Acomat, 
 
 Delighting heretofore in foolish love. 
 
 Hath chang'd his quiet to a soldier's state, 
 
 And turn'd the dulcet tunes of Hymen's song 
 
 Into Bellona's horrible outcries. 
 
 You think it strange that, whereas I have lived 
 
 Almost a votary to wantonness. 
 
 To see me low lay off effeminate robes 
 
 And arm my body in an iron wall. 
 
 I have enjoyed quiet long enough. 
 
 And surfeited with pleasure's surquidrie,^ 
 
 A field of dainties I have passed through. 
 
 And been a champion to fair Cytheree. 
 
 Now since this idle peace hath wearied me 
 
 I'll follow Mars and wars another while. 
 
 And dye my shield in dolorous vermeil. 
 
 Pistol himself never surpassed " dolorous vermeil." 
 
 The second Barnsian characteristic is the introduc- 
 tion, near the end, of a comic part, that of the shepherd 
 BuUithrumble, which is obviously by the same hand as 
 the comic part of Strumbo in Locrine. In both the 
 comic man speaks of his wife's finger-nails as her " ten 
 commandments." In both he sits down to eat his 
 victuals in a solitary place ; a hungry fugitive comes in 
 sight, who mistakes the situation of the comic man, so 
 that in the one case the latter replies, " Good Lord, 
 sir, you are deceived. My name's BuUithrumble," and 
 in the other, " O alas, sir, you are deceived, I am 
 
 1 "Surquedrie" occurs in Chaucer, meaning arrogance ("Parson's 
 Tale," 403). With the same meaning it is used in Kyd's Soliman and 
 Perseda in the mouth of Basilisco, whom I take to have been Barnes, 
 as he is the first draft of Pistol. It occurs also in Pandolfo's part of the 
 dialogue " Of Love, of Women," chapter xii. of Florio's Italian-English 
 conversations called Second Frutes (1591) : "Love is a chimaera, mixt of 
 lion, of goat and of dragon — lion for surquedry, goat for lechery, dragon 
 for cruelty." 
 
 151 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 not Mercury, I am Strumbo" (an adaptation from 
 Plautus).^ 
 
 Lastly, there is the question whether Barnes was not 
 the author of the ' First Part of Henry VI.,' in which 
 Shakespeare's hand can be traced only in the rhymed 
 passages between the two Talbots, and in the scene in 
 the Temple garden (wherein the general theme of the 
 Wars of the Roses is opened), and in the wooing of 
 Margaret of Anjou by Suffolk as the attorney for the 
 king, with Suffolk's great speech to the king on his 
 return. The rhymed Talbot passages were certainly in 
 the play when it was drawing full houses in the spring 
 of 1592 ; but the Shakespearian blank-verse scenes, 
 which are necessary as links between ' i Henry VI.' and 
 * 2 and 3 Henry VI.,' may well have been introduced 
 when the three plays were being revised by Shakespeare, 
 so as to make them into a consistent trilogy. 
 
 It is agreed by the critics that the First Part stands 
 by itself in bad pre-eminence. It is not only inferior 
 in style, but its tone and sentiment in relation to the 
 Maid of Orleans is positively odious. Mr. Swinburne, 
 who has remarked the resemblance of the style to the 
 weaker portions of ' Titus Andronicus ' and to Selimus, 
 is of opinion that it is not above the range of Peele 
 " at his best," and that, as he had already defamed 
 Eleanor of Castile, he would take no discredit by being 
 made the defamer of the Maid of Orleans. There does 
 not appear, on inspection, to be any essential likeness in 
 Peele's Edward I. to the coarseness and brutality of the 
 English heroes in their talk about, and treatment of, 
 Joan of Arc. If there were any historical or traditional 
 excuse, such as Peele had in the case of Queen Eleanor, 
 
 1 The " business " of the shepherd Bullithrumble in Selimus is not un- 
 like the action at a certain part of the popular farce Musedorus, which 
 contains a curious pun upon the name Barnes, and another pun upon the 
 name Constable, as well as an enigmatic reference to the two persons having 
 been born in adjoining parishes (Henry Constable was born at Newark and 
 Barnabe Barnes at York). It is singular that Musedorus is another of 
 the plays " attributed to Shakespeare," Payne Collier having convinced him- 
 self that at least one scene was his. 
 
 152 
 
THE AUTHOR OF ' i HENRY VI.' 
 
 for the view taken of her in ' i Henry VI.' as a religious 
 impostor, who became the mistress of the several French 
 princes in succession, and pleaded pregnancy in the end 
 to save herself from the stake, there can be no excuse 
 for the tactless, tasteless, verbose way in which it is set 
 forth. Besides the hypothesis of Peele's authorship, the 
 only other as to this most puzzling of the three parts of 
 ' Henry VI.' is that it was the work of a combination 
 of the whole Greene coterie, including Lodge. That 
 Greene was thinking of its great success during the 
 months preceding, when he penned his attack upon 
 Shakespeare, seems very probable ; but probable also 
 that he had been pointing at the real author of it in 
 that part of the libel which Chettle suppressed. 
 
 I take the real author to have been Barnabe Barnes, 
 for various reasons. The style is the style of Locrine, 
 of the latter two-thirds or three-fourths of Selimus, and 
 of the unrevised portions of ' Titus Andronicus,' — ^the 
 style of Pistol at his desk, Barnes was the original, as 
 I shall show, of Pistol, Don Armado, and Parolles. 
 Shakespeare caricatured him also as Strumbo in his own 
 play of Locrine, in the only scene of it which he 
 rewrote, and as Lodowick in ' Edward III.,' which was 
 also the work of Barnes in the three last Acts. He 
 had no opportunity of caricaturing his collaborator in 
 ' I Hen VI.,' but he took the first opportunity of doing 
 so in the part of Basilisco, in Kyd's play of Soliman and 
 Perseda, at the end of the same year. It is indeed in 
 ' I Henry VI.' that we find the suggestion of the name 
 Basilisco, and of its subsequent change to Pistol. These 
 lines, from the fourth Act, contain a play upon the two 
 meanings of basilisk, the fabulous creature with deadly 
 glance and a weapon of artillery : 
 
 O were mine eyeballs into bullets turned 
 That I in rage might shoot them at your faces ! 
 
 Also the glance of the basilisk is ascribed (by the author, 
 
 153 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 but not in history) to the deceased Henry V, at the 
 opening of the play : 
 
 His sparkling eyes, replete with wrathful fire, 
 More dazzled and drove back his enemies 
 Than mid-day sun fierce bent against their faces. 
 
 It was Barnes himself who was celebrated for his ferocious 
 " cat-a-mountain " looks, which served to gain him a 
 wholly undeserved reputation for martial spirit ; and 
 that is why they are proper to the aspect and mien of 
 Pistol, who looked as if he were always ready to go off, 
 but never did. That is also the leading idea of Basilisco 
 in his bragging with Piston, in Kyd's play.^ Barnes had 
 lately returned from the seat of war in Normandy, from 
 which the stories of his cowardice followed him to 
 London, to give the lie to his bragging, and to make 
 him the butt of the wits. As Nash tells us, he returned 
 to wield the more congenial weapon of the pen, the first 
 achievement of which might very well have been the 
 " drum-and-trumpet thing," ' King Henry the Sixth,' or 
 the English in France at the time of Joan of Arc. 
 He had taken it to Henslowe's theatre, and had there 
 made the acquaintance of Shakespeare, who had been 
 asked to dress it for the stage. Shakespeare appropriated 
 it eventually as his own ; and I can find no more rational 
 explanation of his having done so than that it was the 
 work of the singular person whom he came to employ 
 as his literary devil on some subsequent occasions. 
 
 If that hypothesis be correct, we have to date his 
 first connection with Barnes as early as 1591 or 1592, 
 or soon after the latter had returned from his brief 
 experience of campaigning. 
 
 It is known that Barnes courted the society of the 
 
 1 The proof of the identity of Basilisco with Pistol is one of those 
 difficulties which I meet with often in this work. It depends upon an 
 impression from reading the original, which cannot be conveyed by picking 
 out a phrase here or there ; but I will add one suggestive instance, Basilisco's 
 oath, " Now, by the marble face of the welkin," which became Pistol's 
 afterwards, with variations. 
 
PATRONISED BY SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 wits, as well as of the gallants and nobles. Amongst 
 those to whom he wrote sonnets were Essex and South- 
 ampton, His lodging was in Holborn, not far from 
 Southampton House. He was intimate with Florio, 
 who was almost a retainer of Southampton's (and had 
 been servitor to Barnes's brother at Oxford), and it is 
 fairly certain that he was one of the literary coterie who 
 gathered round the young patron of letters. It does 
 not appear that Shakespeare was at all intimate with 
 Southampton before the date of 'Venus and Adonis' 
 (April 1593). Whether Barnes brought Shakespeare to 
 his lordship, or Shakespeare brought Barnes, I shall 
 maintain in the sequel that all three were concerned in 
 a collaboration which resulted in several great plays 
 afterwards claimed by Shakespeare, and in one, ' Edward 
 III.,' which he did not claim. 
 
 The evidence that Shakespeare knew Barnabe Barnes 
 well, and had some peculiar interest in him, depends 
 upon the discovery of his portrait in several of the 
 plays, reproducing the characteristics which are ascribed 
 to him under his name by Nash and others. The 
 evidence that Barnes was used by him to construct plots 
 and to compile materials from Holinshed and other 
 sources depends chiefly upon certain curious things 
 found in so late a play as ' Cymbeline.' The question 
 is most complicated ; but, as it will be a curious fact if 
 it can be disentangled and made good, I shall attempt 
 to deal with it here as a whole, following such order as 
 may be practicable. First a few authentic facts as to 
 Barnes. 
 
 He was born at York in 1569, the son of one of 
 the cathedral canons, who was appointed by Lord 
 Burghley successively Bishop of Carlisle and of Durham. 
 An elder brother, Emanuel, went to Magdalen College, 
 Oxford, and there, when he was of a master's standing, 
 had the celebrated John Florio for his servitor, in May 
 1 58 1. "Barnabye Barness," as his name is given in 
 the matriculation lists, entered in June 1586 at Brasenose, 
 
 iSS 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 of which house his father had been a Fellow. He was 
 then seventeen ; but it appears from Nash that he had 
 been known as a youth of promise before that to Sir 
 Philip Sidney (who died in 1586) ; which is less im- 
 probable than it may seem to us, both by reason of the 
 early maturity of many in that age, and from Barnes's 
 own statement, in one of his poems, that his manly 
 passions were developed at the precocious age of 
 fourteen. He must have been in London in 1588, 
 for he tells us in a work of the year 1606 that he had 
 seen the heroic bearing of the Queen at the time of the 
 Armada. In 1591 he got a commission in the expedi- 
 tion under Lord Essex to Normandy, in aid of Henry 
 of Navarre against the Duke of Parma. He recalled 
 this in his work of 1606 (instancing Essex's habit 
 of sharing in the sports and labours of the common 
 soldiers — setting the watch, walking the round, etc. 
 like Shakespeare's Henry V. before the battle of 
 Agincourt), and "an infinite number" of cases of 
 insubordination towards officers. The latter testimony 
 is important, because it gives colour to the statement 
 of Nash, that Barnes, after a week or two of following 
 the camp, went to the General to get leave to return 
 home, being in fear of his life from the rough soldiery. 
 " Upon this motion there were divers warlike knights 
 and pirincipal captains who, rather than they would be 
 bereaved of his pleasant company, offered to pick out 
 a strong guard amongst them for the safeguarding and 
 better shielding him from peril." Nash is ironical, but 
 he probably meant it as true that the headquarters' 
 staff did enjoy Barnes's pleasant company. By all 
 accounts he must have been a person of some fascina- 
 tion upon a superficial view — majestic in bearing, well 
 dressed, an exquisite in his language, and a source of 
 amusement to manlier spirits than himself. On his 
 return he seems to have bragged of his exploits in the 
 field ; for Thomas Campion, who wrote witty Latin 
 epigrams on all kinds of themes, made one of his 
 
 156 
 
EPIGRAMMED BY CAMPION 
 
 great hits upon young Barnes, the lines having been 
 " universally applauded " according to Nash. They 
 are ii. 80, in his volume of 1595 : 
 
 Mortales decern tela inter Gallica caesos, 
 
 Marte tuo perhibes. In numero vitium est : 
 
 Mortales nullos si dicere, Barne, volebas, 
 Servasset numerum versus, itemque fidem. 
 
 " You maintain that you slew ten in the French war. 
 There is a mistake in the number. If you had said 
 ' none,' my Barnes, the verse would have kept the 
 metre as well as spoken the truth." Nash's free 
 paraphrase of Campion from memory was : " He 
 shows how he bragged, when he was in France he 
 slew ten men ; when, fearful cowbaby, he never heard 
 piece shot off but he fell flat on his face." A still 
 wittier epigram of Campion's upon him in the same 
 collection had reference to his volume of poems, 
 Parthenophil and Parthenope, published by the help of 
 Gabriel Harvey in 1593. Among these sonnets is a 
 sequence of twelve upon the Signs of the Zodiac. They 
 are delicately, or rather indelicately, suggestive. Under 
 Capricorn, he is ingeniously goaty. Under Aquarius, 
 to show the degree of intimacy with his mistress, he 
 mingles his kisses in her wine, and thus insinuates 
 himself into her very inmost parts. Campion completes 
 the transit of the wine through the emunctories usque 
 ad makllam : 
 
 Exceptus tandem, qualis amator eris ? 
 
 Barnes's first volume of verse proves that he was 
 certainly ingenious in fancy, and that he had a copious 
 vocabulary, but that insincerity and verbosity were his 
 besetting sins. Those faults are seen most in his 
 personal sonnets, the flattering ones addressed to Lords 
 Essex, Southampton and others, the scurrilous ones 
 written upon Nash in respect of his quarrel with 
 Gabriel Harvey, in which Barnes was foolish enough 
 
 157 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 to mix himself. Nash admits that " there was some- 
 times some pretty expectation of this Patter-wallet and 
 Megiddo" and gives a most interesting account of how 
 Sir Philip Sidney at one time favoured him. Gabriel 
 Harvey, the arbiter of classical taste, had a high opinion 
 of him, calling him " Parthenopaeus, the son of the 
 brave Meleager, Homer himself, and the swift Atalanta, 
 Calliope herself. ... Be thou, Barnabe, the gallant 
 poet like Spenser, or the valiant soldier like Baskerville ; 
 and ever remember thy French service under the brave 
 Earl of Essex." Even so robust an old campaigner 
 and so pithy a poet as Churchyard ranked him, in 1595, 
 with Spenser and Daniel : 
 
 One Barnes, that Petrarch's scholar is, 
 May march with them in rank. 
 
 Two years after Parthenophil, he published a second 
 volume, A Centurie of Spiritual Sonnets, with a dedica- 
 tion to Dr. Tobie Mathew, his father's successor in 
 the see of Durham, and an address "to the Christian 
 readers." This is more purely verbiage than the former 
 volume, and makes a most unpleasant impression. Both 
 the prose prefaces and the verse are filled with long 
 strings of words from the great hymns of the Apo- 
 calypse and other exalted passages of Scripture, without 
 one touch of genuine religious emotion. The first 
 sonnet shows how a change had come over him between 
 1593 and 1595: 
 
 No more lewd lays of lighter loves I sing, 
 Nor teach my lustful Muse abused to fly 
 With sparrow's plumes, and for compassion cry 
 To mortal beauties which no succour bring ; 
 But my Muse, feathered with an Angel's wing, 
 Divinely mounts aloft unto the sky. 
 
 The change from the material wine of the Aquarius 
 sonnet of 1593 is thorough enough, if somewhat 
 abrupt : 
 
 158 
 
HIS PIOUS PHASE 
 
 To my poor Muse let him his ears incline, 
 Thirsting to taste of that celestial wine 
 Whose purple stream hath our salvation won. 
 O gracious Bridegroom and thrice lovely Bride, 
 Which come and fill : who will for ever cry 
 " Water of life to no man is denied : 
 Fill still who will, if any man be dry." 
 O heavenly voice ! I thirst, I thirst and come 
 For life, with other sinners to get some. 
 
 It was this sudden change of tune that disgusted men 
 most, and more than anything else made him a mark 
 for ridicule. Nash calls his Centurie of Spiritual Sonnets 
 "such another device as the godly ballad of John 
 Careless or the song of 'Green Sleeves' moralised." 
 He is heard of next in connection with John Florio's 
 Italian-English dictionary called A World of Wordes, 
 to which he contributed a congratulatory poem over 
 his name, and almost certainly also the three dedi- 
 catory sonnets signed " II Candido," to the Earls of 
 Southampton and Rutland and the Countess of Bedford. 
 The name of Barnes disappears from view thereafter 
 until Campion's new volume of epigrams in 1602, in 
 one of which he is exhibited with remarkable plainness 
 as a married man maintained in that capacity by Gabriel 
 Harvey. Next we hear of him in 1606 as the author 
 of a prose treatise on the services of the State, fulsomely 
 dedicated to King James ; and the year after as the 
 author of a tragedy, Tke Divil's Charter, which was 
 produced on the King's private stage at Whitehall by 
 the Globe company on Candlemas night, 1607. He 
 died in November 1609, and was buried at Durham. 
 These appear to be all the biographical facts, except 
 that he was the reputed author of an unpublished tragedy 
 called The Battle of Hexham. 
 
 Into this meagre outline we have to fill the form 
 and colour of Barnes as an acquaintance of Shakespeare's 
 from as early a date as 1592, as his " plotter " especially 
 in the plays based upon Holinshed, and at the same 
 time as the butt of his wit. In the latter capacity he 
 
 159 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 appears first as Basilisco in the Shakespearian scenes 
 of Kyd's Soliman and Perseda ; next in his own play 
 Locrine in one of the Strumbo scenes ; then as Pistol 
 in the original ' Henry V.' (and subsequently) ; then as 
 Don Armado in ' Love's Labour's Lost ' ; and lastly, 
 in a general review of his whole career, as ParoUes in 
 'All's Well that Ends Well.' His identity can be 
 proved most easily in the two last characters, which I 
 shall therefore deal with somewhat fully. 
 
 Barnabe Barnes as Don Adriano de Armado 
 
 The Don Armado of ' Love's Labour's Lost ' (pro- 
 duced at Christmas, 1597) is a finished study, adapted 
 to a Court auditory, with innumerable witty touches, 
 which were almost certainly recognised at the time, and 
 are thus the means of proving his identity with Barnes. 
 They are taken both from his volume of lyrical verse and 
 from the three sonnets, signed " II Candido," which John 
 Florio got written for his World of Wordes, and from the 
 dialogue on Love in his Second Frutes. Warburton 
 was led to suspect some connection between ' Love's 
 Labour's Lost' and Florio, whom he took to be the 
 original of the pedant Holofernes. Johnson did not 
 think the part suited Florio. It will be found to suit 
 Gabriel Harvey, whose identity is probably concealed in 
 the very deep wit of V. ii. 600-634, which needs Nash's 
 Have with Ton to Saffron Walden to explain it. The 
 humour of the following by Holofernes upon Armado 
 is that Harvey is charging his pupil and protigi Barnes 
 with faults which are also his own. 
 
 Nath. I did converse this quondam day with a companion of 
 the king's, who is intituled, nominated, or called Don Adriano de 
 Armado. 
 
 Holof. Novi hominem tanquam te : his humour is lofty, his dis- 
 course peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait 
 majestical, and his general behaviour vain, ridiculous and thrasonical. 
 He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too 
 peregrinate as I may call it. 
 
 160 
 
AS DON ARMADO 
 
 Nath. A most singular and choice epithet, 
 
 {Draws out his table-book. 
 
 Holof. He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the 
 thread of his argument. I abhor such fanatical phantasimes, such 
 insociable and point -devise companions ; such rackers of ortho- 
 graphy, as to speak " dout " fine when he should say " doubt " ; 
 " det " when he should pronounce " debt " — d, e, b, t, not d, e, t ; 
 he clepeth a calf, caulf; half, haulf ; neighbour vocatur nebour ; 
 neigh, abbreviated ne. This is abhominable, which he would call 
 abbominable ; it insinuateth me of insanie : anne intelligis, domine ? 
 to make frantic, lunatic. 
 
 Nath. Laus Deo. Bene intelligo. 
 
 It is obvious that Holofernes is finding fault with 
 Armado for mannerisms which he himself is exemplify- 
 ing all the while. " Thrasonical " brag was originally 
 invented by Harvey for Greene. The joke about 
 pronouncing debt, d, e, b, t, not d, e, t, appears to refer 
 to Harvey's spelling " your dettour " at the end of 
 one of his prefaces, and to the rhyme in II Candido's 
 sonnet to the Countess of Bedford : 
 
 Excellent madam, chief grace of the Graces, 
 Mind of the Muses, commendation's letter, 
 To whom for virtue Nature is a detter. 
 
 The not altogether rare spelling " abhominable " is 
 found in Barnes's Locrine (quarto of 1595) ; Armado's 
 fault did not lie in that spelling, but in not sounding 
 the h in pronouncing. "He clepeth a calf, caulf" is 
 true of Barnes. Thus, in his acknowledged verse, balm 
 is baulme. In ' Edward III.' the mannerisms of spelling 
 are striking in some parts of the first quarto (1596) : 
 they are all removed in the second (1599).^ Thus the 
 Duke of Lorraine says (in the quarto of 1596) : 
 
 I doe pronounce defyaunce to thy face ; 
 
 1 The following are some of the instances in Locrine : countermaund, 
 demaund, braunch, graunt, daunce, launce, launciers. On the other hand, 
 vaults is " valts," and guarded " garded." Devoted is " devolted," hemm'd 
 is " hembde j " strands or stronds (of Albion) is " strons," uncouth is 
 " uncoth," youngest is " yoongst," set forth is " set foorth," like the " bray 
 foorth " of ' Edward III." 
 
 161 M 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 and the Black Prince answers, in a true Shakespearian 
 
 speech : 
 
 Defiance, Frenchman ; we rebound it back. 
 
 Except in the passages almost entirely Shakespearian, 
 France is Fraunce. Thus the first occurrence of 
 " France " is in the following by King Edward : 
 
 See how occasion laughes me in the face. 
 No sooner minded to prepare for France, etc. 
 
 This affectation of archaic spelling is one of the means 
 of tracking Barnes in works which do not bear his 
 name, and one of the means of identifying him as 
 Armado. 
 
 The identity of Barnes, still complicated with 
 Harvey, is shown principally in Armado's wooing of 
 Jacquenetta, the authentic documents for Barnes's senti- 
 ments being his first volume of lyrical verse and the 
 sonnets to Lords Rutland and Southampton, written by 
 "II Candido" for Florio. That nom-de-plume appears 
 to be pointed at in " draweth from my snow-white pen 
 the ebon-coloured ink which here thou viewest, be- 
 holdest, surveyest, or seest."^ The sonnet to Lord 
 Rutland, whose family name was Manners, is occupied 
 with puns upon " manners " and " manors." These 
 reappear in the following by Costard, describing his 
 capture by Armado in the company of Jacquenetta. 
 
 Cost. In manner and form following, sir ; all those three : I was 
 seen with her in the manor-house sitting with her upon the form, 
 and taken following her into the park, which, put together, is in 
 the manner and form following. 
 
 1 That Barnes was " II Candido " is made probable by what Nash says 
 in Have •with You to Saffron Walden. In the midst of his remarks upon 
 Barnes, he brings in an apocryphal gentlewoman, supposed Harvey's 
 patroness, in whose name a sonnet had been written preceding the one 
 signed with Barnes's name. She is called " the excellent gentlewoman, his 
 
 Eatroness, or rather championess, in this quarrel, ' meeter by nature and fitter 
 y nurture to be an enchanting angel with a white quill than a tormenting 
 fury with^er black ink.' . . . The gendewoman having taken her I'envoy, 
 Barnabe Barnes steps in with an epistle to the right worshipful his especial 
 dear friend, Gabriel Harvey, Doctor of the Law." 
 
 162 
 
AS DON ARMADO 
 
 One line of the Rutland sonnet is the occasion of the 
 long joke about the colour of green, which seems to 
 have been associated at that time with Delilah : Samson 
 "surely affected her for her wit" (perhaps the green 
 withes are meant, just as Moth is pronounced Mote). 
 
 Proving, by profiting, where you have been, 
 Bemantling grave conceits in colour green. 
 
 The sonnet to Southampton contains these lines : 
 
 Brave Earl, bright pearl of Peers, peerless Nobilitie, 
 The height of arms and arts in one aspiring. 
 Valour writh grace, with valour grace attiring ; 
 Who, more to amplify virtue's habilitie, 
 
 To add to fore-learn'd faculty facilitie. 
 
 Now liv'st in travel, . . . 
 
 Immutable in travel's mutabilitie. 
 
 These rhymes are parodied by Shakespeare thus : 
 
 Nath. Perge, good Master Holofernes, perge, so it shall please 
 you to aborogate scurrilitie. 
 
 Holof. I will something affect the letter, for it argueth facilitie. 
 {Recites) 
 
 The preyful princess pierced and prick'd a pretty pleasing 
 pricket, etc. 
 
 Coming to the wooing of Jacquenetta : 
 
 Armado. I will hereupon confess I am in love ; and as it is base 
 for a soldier to love, so am I in love with a base wench. If drawing 
 my sword against the humour of affection would deliver me from 
 the reprobate thought of it, I would take Desire prisoner, etc. 
 
 This is Barnes's militant attitude against the seduc- 
 tions of the sex (see also under Selimus, p. 151): 
 
 Mine eyes, these vain seducers, I did fix 
 On Pallas and on Mars, home and in field ; 
 And, armed strongly lest my better part 
 To milder objects should itself inmix, 
 I vow'd I never would to beauty yield. 
 
 But he capitulated to the charms of Jacquenetta : 
 
 Adieu, valour ! rust, rapier ! be still, drum ! for your manager 
 is in love ; yea, he loveth. Assist me, some extemporal god of 
 
 163 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise, wit ; write, pen ; 
 for I am for whole volumes in folio. 
 
 This is Nash's account of Barnes leaving the war in 
 France : " But home he would, nothing could stay him, 
 to finish Parthenophil and Parthenope." 
 
 Again, Don Armado epitomises the philosophy of 
 Barnes, as Strumbo had already done in Locrine : 
 
 I do affect the very ground, which is base, where her shoe, which 
 is baser, guided by her foot, which is basest, doth tread. I shall be 
 forsworn, which is a great argument of falsehood, if I love. And 
 how can that be true love which is falsely attempted .'' Love is a 
 familiar ; Love is a devil ; there is no evil angel but Love.^ 
 
 1 These paradoxes are found in Florio's Second Frutes (1591), in the 
 1 2th Dialogue, " Of Love, of Women," in which Pandolfo calls love " a right 
 incarnate devil. . . Women are in churches saints, abroad angels, at home 
 devils, at windows sirens, at doors pyes, in gardens goats." It is probable 
 that Florio got some of his friends to contribute to the English side of his 
 dialogues, for which he supplied the Italian. I suspect that his pupil 
 Southampton was one of those, the Dormiglione of the 12th Dialogue. It 
 has been made probable also, by the minute analysis of a competent critic 
 the late Professor Minto, that Shakespeare wrote for " his friend John 
 Florio" the commendatory sonnet signed Phaeton, which would thus be 
 the earliest lyric verse that we have from his pen, the date being previous 
 to the 30th April 1591. Although there is plenty of rhyme in the body 
 of the book, there is nothing at all comparable with the exquisite diction 
 of this exercise upon the name Florio : 
 
 Sweet friend, whose name agrees with thy increase. 
 
 How fit a rival art thou of the Spring ! 
 
 For when each branch hath left his flourishing. 
 
 And green-lockt Summer's shady pleasures cease, 
 she makes the Winter's storms repose in peace 
 
 And spends her franchise upon each living thing, etc. 
 
 When Florio published his next book, the World of Wordes (1598), he 
 occupied much of his preface with an angry rejoinder to a certain H. S., 
 who had attacked his First Frutes, "lighting upon a good sonnet of a friend 
 of mine that loved better to be a poet than to be accounted one," and calling 
 the author of it "a rhymer." It is inconceivable that any one should 
 have attacked Phaeton's gende verses. The sonnet referred to is a very 
 different, and indeed coarse, thing, introduced at p. 131 of the body of the 
 book, being a rhyming enumeration of the thirty parts of a perfect 
 woman : 
 
 In choice of fair are thirty things required, 
 
 For which (they say) fair Helen was admired : 
 
 Three white, three black, three red, three short, three tall. 
 
 Three thick, three thin, three straight, three wide, three small, etc. 
 
 The person who was attacked (if not imprisoned) for "a rhymer" was 
 Gabriel Harvey, and the man who attacked him was Thomas Nash, the 
 
 164 
 
AS PAROLLES 
 
 The correspondence of Armado with the future 
 ParoUes will appear in general terms from the following : 
 
 Our court you know is haunted 
 
 With a refined traveller of Spain ; 
 A man in all the world's new fashion planted, 
 
 That hath a mint of phrases in his brain ; 
 One whom the music of his own vain tongue 
 
 Doth ravish like enchanting harmony. 
 
 He was a child of fancy : 
 
 But, I protest, I love to hear him lie ; 
 And I will use him for my minstrelsey. 
 
 This is just what Campion says of Barnes : 
 
 All wonders Barnzy speaks, all grossly feigned. 
 Speak some wonder once, Barnzy : speak the truth. 
 
 Barnabe Barnes as Parolles 
 
 ParoUes in ' All's Well that Ends Well ' is a far 
 more complete portrait than Don Armado or Pistol ; he 
 is Barnes seen in perspective from the beginning to the 
 end of his career. He makes so large a part of the 
 comedy, that he has been taken out from the story of 
 Bertram and Helena in a French adaptation, and made 
 the central figure in a play of three acts called Paroles. 
 The date of ' All's Well ' is a problem so technical that 
 I deal with it in a note at the end of the chapter. The 
 conclusion is, that it was one of the later comedies, and 
 that it must have been still unfinished about the time 
 when ' Cymbeline ' was under hand. Barnes died in 
 
 H. S. of Florio's enigmatic reference (perhaps " silver-tongued H. Smith " 
 of Nash's own enigmatic reference in Pierce Pennilesse). Nash refers to 
 some scandalous " game called rhyming " by Harvey, in his Strange Neiues 
 (1592), and again in his Hanie iviti You (1596) : "It was Thomas Watson 
 the poet, a man that I dearly loved and honoured, and for all things hath 
 left few his equals in England — he it was that, in the company of divers 
 gentlemen one night at supper at the Nag's Head in Cheape, first told me 
 of his vanity, and these hexameters made of him : 
 
 But O what news of that good Gabriel Harvey, 
 
 Known to the world for a fool and dapt in the Fleet for a rhymer ? " 
 
 i6S 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 the end of 1609, and it seems most probable that he 
 was not exhibited upon the stage as Parolles until after 
 his death. 
 
 The chief historical interest of Parolles is his re- 
 markable influence over Count Bertram, whom I take to 
 be Southampton, according to the evidence of identity 
 given in a subsequent chapter. The evil influence of 
 Parolles is of the very essence of the play ; it is he 
 who induces the young count to go off to the wars 
 and leave his newly-wedded wife. When his mother 
 is told of it, she asks : 
 
 Count. Who was with him ? 
 
 1st Gent. A servant only, and a gentleman 
 Which I have sometimes known. 
 
 Count. Parolles, was it not ? 
 
 1st Gent. Ay, my good lady, he. 
 
 Count. A very tainted fellow, and full of wickedness. 
 My son corrupts a well-derived nature 
 With his inducement. 
 
 The relations between the Count and his follower 
 are not only intimate but effeminate. When Bertram 
 comes in after his unwilling marriage to Helena, 
 showing signs of his displeasure, Parolles asks : " What's 
 the matter, sweet-heart ? " and Bertram answers : " O, 
 my Parolles, they have married me ! " He believes 
 in Parolles so firmly that the old lord Lafeu takes upon 
 him to caution him ; his trust in his follower continues 
 through the military campaign, and is not destroyed 
 until two of his brother officers contrive a stratagem, 
 by which Parolles is unmasked. 
 
 There is no external proof that Barnes was ever so 
 mistaken by Southampton, or so deep in his lordship's 
 confidence.^ Whether or not that can be made probable 
 
 1 In Drayton's eighth Eclogue (as rewritten) some one is referred to as 
 " deceitful Cerberon " and as a " beastly clown," who had replaced him in 
 the good graces of his patroness Selena, or the Countess of Bedford. As 
 Cerberon has not been identified among the poets of the time, I venture 
 to suggest that he was Barnes. The Countess of Bedford was one of the 
 three patrons of Florio's World of Wordes, to whom " II Candido " wrote 
 the dedicatory sonnets, Southampton and Rutland being the other two. 
 
 166 
 
AS PAROLLES 
 
 by internal evidence, in a round-about way, we must at 
 the outset give up the search for a literal correspond- 
 ence between the dramatic situation and the real. In 
 the first place, Shakespeare allegorises when he makes 
 ParoUes the follower of Bertram in the wars. Barnes's 
 only known military service was with the expedition of 
 Essex in 1591, which Southampton was not allowed to 
 accompany, being too young. It was as a poet, or man 
 of letters, and a man of fashion in London, not as a 
 " militarist," that Barnes was known to Lord Southamp- 
 ton. The change from literature to arms is carried out 
 in the play almost completely ; so that it is only 
 through the discovery of certain verses in his pocket 
 that we know Parolles to be a poet at all. This is the 
 kind of dramatic artifice that might be expected by way 
 of concealing the identities of parties, and is of the same 
 kind as in * Troilus and Cressida ' on a larger scale. It 
 ought not to weaken the probability that Parolles is 
 Barnes and Bertram Southampton. 
 
 In this comedy his career is followed from beginning 
 to end ; but it is necessarily focussed into the narrow 
 space of the dramatic action ; and, by an equal necessity, 
 the phases of it cannot always be taken in their order. 
 We begin with his first poems, Parthenophil and 
 Parthenope (1593). That is the meaning of the long 
 discourse on Virginity (the root-idea of his Greek 
 title) which Parolles drags in when he enters first, not 
 without ironical fitness to the real situation of Helena, 
 to whom it is addressed : 
 
 Par. Are you meditating on virginity ? 
 
 Hel. Ay. You have some stain of soldier in you : let me ask 
 you a question. Man is enemy to virginity ; how may we barricade 
 it against him ? 
 
 The idea is just the feminine counterpart of Armado's 
 in ' Love's Labour's Lost,' and a satire upon Barnes's 
 doctrine, cited before, that in serving Mars he was 
 " armed " against the attractions of Venus. Having 
 thus brought up the topic, Parolles discourses upon it 
 
 167 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 in a way which has no special relevancy to his own 
 character, or to the subject-matter of Parthenophil; 
 it is rather the kind of flippant talk which is elsewhere 
 put into the mouth of the clown. In this play, also, 
 the clown is given a speech which reproduces very 
 closely the substance of Campion's epigram upon 
 Barnes's married life, quoted below. The clown, a 
 propos of nothing in the play, past or to come, asks 
 leave of his mistress, the Countess, to get married. 
 The Countess questions his reasons : 
 
 Count. Is this all your worship's reason ? 
 
 Clo. Faith, madam, I have other holy reasons, such as they are. 
 
 Count. May the world know them ? 
 
 Clo. I have been, madam, a wicked creature, as you and all 
 flesh and blood are ; and indeed I do marry that I may repent. 
 
 Count. Thy marriage, sooner than thy wickedness. 
 
 Clo. I am out o' friends, madam ; and I hope to have friends for 
 my wife's sake. 
 
 Count. Such friends are thine enemies, knave. 
 
 Clo. You're shallow, madam, in great friends : for the knaves 
 come to do that for me which I am aweary of. He that ears my 
 land spares my team and gives me leave to in the crop ; if I be his 
 cuckold, he's my drudge ; he that comforts my wife is the cherisher 
 of my flesh and blood ; he that loves my flesh and blood is my 
 friend ; ergo, he that kisses my wife is my friend. If men could be 
 contented to be what they are, there were no fear in marriage, etc. 
 
 This, according to Campion, was exactly the 
 situation of Barnes : 
 
 But this Barnzy knows that his Matilda, 
 Scorning him, with Harvey plays the wanton. 
 Knows it ! Nay desires it, and by prayers 
 Daily begs of heaven that it for ever 
 May stand firm for him : yet he's no cuckold. 
 And this is true ; for Harvey keeps Matilda, 
 Fosters Barnzy and relieves his household. 
 Buys the cradle and begets the children. 
 Pays the nurses, every charge defraying. 
 Another truly plays Matilda's husband ; 
 So that Barnzy now becomes a cipher 
 And himself the adulterer of Matilda. 
 Mock not him with horns ; the case is altered — 
 Harvey bears the wrong, he proves the cuckold. 
 i68 
 
AS PAROLLES 
 
 But Campion's epigram had been used also in 
 another part of the play. When Helena has succeeded 
 in forcing Bertram into a marriage, Parolles congratulates 
 her ironically : 
 
 Par. Bless you, my fortunate lady ! 
 
 Hel. I hope, sir, I have your good will to have mine own good 
 fortunes. 
 
 Par. You had my prayers to lead them on ; and to keep them on 
 have them still. 
 
 This is Campion's allegation that Barnes not only 
 knew of Gabriel Harvey's relations with his wife, but 
 desired the same, and made their continuance a matter 
 of his daily prayers : 
 
 Knowrs it ! nay desires it, and by prayers 
 Daily begs of heaven that it for ever 
 May stand firm for him. 
 
 The piety of Parolles comes in twice besides. The 
 old lord Lafeu, who had " found him " before any one 
 else suspected him, brings him word of the marriage : 
 
 Laf. Sirrah, your lord and master's married ; there's news for 
 you ; you have a nevir mistress. 
 
 Par. I most unfeignedly beseech your lordship to make some 
 reservation of your wrongs : he is my good lord ; whom I serve 
 above is my master. 
 
 Laf. Who ? God ? 
 
 Par. Ay, sir. 
 
 La/. The devil it is that's thy master. 
 
 Bertram remonstrates against Lafeu's distrust of 
 Parolles : 
 
 Bert. It may be you have mistaken him, my lord. 
 
 Laf. And shall do so ever, though I took him at his prayers. 
 
 One of the clearest proofs that Shakespeare meant 
 Barnes to be Parolles is this same " smoking " of the 
 latter by Lafeu : 
 
 Laf. I did think thee, for two ordinaries, to be a pretty wise 
 fellow : thou didst make tolerable vent of thy travel ; it might pass. 
 ... I have now found thee. 
 
 169 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 Pistol, in * Henry V.,' is the same plausible person ; 
 Fluellen was deceived in him for a time, but found him 
 out after Gower had roused his suspicions. The early 
 detection of ParoUes by Lafeu is made much of in 
 the play, reappearing at the close, where ParoUes, 
 reduced to begging, reminds him : " You were the 
 first that found me," as a claim upon his charity. 
 The meaning of all this is the interesting fact (for so 
 we may take it) related by Nash, that Sir Philip Sidney 
 was not long in seeing through the boy-poet : 
 
 As he was a natural cherisher of men of the least towardness 
 in any art whatsoever, he held him in some regard j and so did 
 most men. But afterward, when his ambitious pride and 
 vanity unmaskt itself so egregiously, both in his looks, his gait, 
 his gestures and speeches, and he would do nothing but crake 
 and parrot in print in how many noblemen's favours he was, 
 and blab every light speech they uttered to him in private, 
 cockering and coying himself beyond imagination, then Sir 
 Philip Sidney, by little and little, began to look askance on 
 him, and not to care for him, though utterly shake him oiF he 
 could not, he would so fawn and hang upon him. 
 
 Barnes could have been only a boy at the time, 
 although a precocious one (as we know from himself), 
 Sidney having died in 1586, the year in which Barnes 
 went to Oxford. In the comedy, the person who first 
 finds out ParoUes is the old lord with the remarkable 
 name, Lafeu, He corresponds with other honest old 
 counsellors in Shakespeare's plays — Le Beau, Escalus, 
 and Gonzalo. The original of them all was Fulke 
 Greville ; and the point in making him the detector of 
 ParoUes is, that he was Sidney's most intimate friend 
 from their school-days at Shrewsbury, and was in a 
 manner the executor of his thoughts to a whole 
 generation after his untimely death. 
 
 Among the other things mentioned of Barnes by 
 Nash in the passage just quoted, the blabbing of noble- 
 men's light speeches is one of the chief things proved 
 against ParoUes in the central scene of ' All's Well that 
 
 170 
 
AS PAROLLES 
 
 Ends Well,' where he is exposed at once for a coward, 
 a braggart, a liar, and a blabber. On another point, 
 his vanity in dress, Nash has related an incident, 
 notorious at the time, which explains why ParoUes is 
 called a " red-tailed humble bee " (perhaps the same 
 reference as that to Armado in the rhyme " the fox, the 
 ape and the humble bee" in 'Love's Labour's Lost'): 
 " Because he would be noted, getting him a strange pair 
 of Babilonian britches [with a Gargantuan appendage], 
 and so went up and down town, and showed himself in 
 the presence at Court, where he was generally laughed 
 at by the noblemen and ladles." Parolles was also a 
 leader of the fashion. Lafeu, addressing the Countess : 
 says : " No, no, no, your son was misled with a snipt- 
 tafFeta fellow there, whose villanous saffron would have 
 made all the unbaked and doughy youth of a nation in 
 his colour." Again, "the soul of this man is in his 
 clothes," and his clothes became him well. One of the 
 French lords declares : '* I will never trust a man again 
 for keeping his sword clean, nor believe he can have 
 everything in him by wearing his apparel neatly." 
 Helena also notes his plausible appearance. She loves 
 him for Bertram's sake : 
 
 And yet I know him a notorious liar, 
 
 Think him a great way fool, solely a coward ; 
 
 Yet these fix'd evils so fit in him, etc. 
 
 Another clue to his identity is his being called a cat 
 three times by Bertram, and by the clown thus : " Here 
 is a purr of fortune's cat — but not a musk-cat." This 
 recalls Nash's remarks pointed apparently at Barnes, on 
 a passage quoted from Gabriel Harvey : " But some 
 had rather be a Pole-cat with a stinking stew than a 
 Musk-cat with a gracious favour." He corresponds 
 also with one Musko, in Dekker's Satiromastix (1602), 
 who cried " mew " at one of Ben Jonson's odes when 
 it was read aloud at the ordinary : his wit was at pawn 
 with his new satin suit and his cheeks were painted. 
 
 171 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 Also Basilisco, the earliest portrait of Barnes on the 
 stage, " wears civet ; and when it was asked him, 
 where he had that musk ? he said all his kindred smelt 
 so." He went supperless to bed, and took physic, to 
 make himself lean. 
 
 ParoUes' theoretical knowledge of the art of war 
 recalls both Pistol and the poet -pimp Lodowick in 
 ' Edward III.' It is clear that Barnes used to pose as 
 an authority upon warfare after his return from the cam- 
 paign of 1 59 1 ; and in his treatise of 1606, upon the 
 civil and military services of the State, he devoted the 
 fourth book to the army. His work is a laborious 
 compilation, not ill- digested, covering the ground 
 systematically, and filled with many examples or pre- 
 cedents, especially from ancient times. But the fact 
 that Barnes, being such as he was, should have essayed 
 to write fifty folio pages upon military service, was a 
 fair subject for satire ; and so Parolles is " the gallant 
 militarist, that had the whole theoric of war in the knot 
 of his scarf, and the practice in the chope of his dagger." 
 He is so much the soldier and man of fashion in the 
 play, that one hardly thinks of him as a poet. But his 
 gifts in that way are not overlooked altogether : for he 
 is found with a remarkable sonnet in his pocket 
 addressed to Diana. When Bertram hears it read out, 
 he says : " He shall be whipped through the army with 
 this rhyme in's forehead." 
 
 After he has been thoroughly exposed and given up 
 by Bertram, he soliloquises like Pistol in ' Henry V. ' : 
 
 Par. Yet I am thankful : if my heart were great, 
 'T would burst at this. Captain I'll be no more ; 
 But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft 
 As captain shall : simply the thing I am 
 Shall make me live. Who knows himself a braggart, 
 Let him fear this ; for it will come to pass 
 That every braggart shall be found an ass. 
 Rust, sword ! cool, blushes ! and Parolles, live 
 Safest in shame ! being fool'd, by foolery thrive ! 
 There's place and means for every man alive. 
 172 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ASSISTANT 
 
 This was probably the situation of Barnabe Barnes 
 for the greater part of his life in London. In the play 
 his career has to be compressed into the space of the 
 action ; so that Parolles appears in the last Act as 
 already reduced to beggary — " fallen into the unclean 
 fish-pond of Fortune's displeasure." He comes on with 
 a begging letter for Lord Lafeu, which he hands to the 
 clown with the remark, " I am now, sir, muddied in 
 fortune's mood [probably his affected pronunciation], 
 and smell somewhat strong of her strong displeasure." 
 The clown pretends to smell him literally : " Prithee, 
 allow the wind." 
 
 Par. Nay, you need not stop your nose, sir ; I spake but by 
 metaphor. 
 
 Clown. Indeed, sir, if your metaphor stink, I will stop my 
 nose. 
 
 The stinking metaphor is the notorious figure of speech 
 in Barnes's Aquarius sonnet in his first volume of poems. 
 This parting shaft of wit should suffice by itself to mark 
 Parolles as Barnes. 
 
 While there may be willingness to admit that one 
 and the same real person stood for the portraits of 
 Pistol, Don Armado, and Parolles, and that that person 
 was Barnabe Barnes, it may seem improbable that Shake- 
 speare ever employed him as his literary devil. The 
 evidence, apart from that given at the beginning of this 
 chapter, comes exclusively from ' Cymbeline,' and from 
 only one or two places of it ; but if it mean anything 
 at all, it should mean that Barnes was occupied at that 
 time in making plots for Shakespeare, and perhaps draft- 
 ing scenes for him to rewrite. That hypothesis might 
 be used to explain the well-known presence of an inferior 
 hand in the second scene of ' Macbeth,' where the bleed- 
 ing sergeant delivers the news of Macbeth's victory 
 in language which reminds one exactly of Locrine 
 and of the three last Acts of 'Edward III.,' and is 
 
 173 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 followed by the thane of Ross to describe the same 
 event over again in the proper style of the rest of the 
 play. The need of some such hypothesis is admitted 
 by every one for * Pericles,' and in a way for ' Timon of 
 Athens.' I confine myself here to ' Cymbeline,' as to 
 which there is some evidence through the tragedy pub- 
 lished under the name of Barnes, The DiviVs Charter. 
 This extraordinary play was produced before King 
 James at Whitehall on Candlemas night, 2nd February 
 1607, " by his Majesty's servants," who were Shake- 
 speare's fellows at the Globe. It must have been in 
 rehearsal at the Globe, and it is further brought near to 
 Shakespeare in that it followed his own ' King Lear ' 
 on the Whitehall private stage at an interval of five 
 weeks. It is hardly possible to conceive a greater con- 
 trast than between that highest flight of tragic genius 
 and the medley of murders, incests, paederasties, and 
 necromancies of which The DiviFs Charter consists. 
 The name is taken from the bargain made between 
 Roderigo Borgia, afterwards Pope Alexander VI., and 
 the Devil to sell his soul for the reversion of the Holy 
 See. King James was catholic enough in his tastes to 
 tolerate both Lear and Borgia upon the same stage ; 
 while Shakespeare is sardonic enough in 'King Lear' 
 to put up with anything and be surprised at nothing. 
 It appears that he knew Barnes's scene between the 
 Borgia Pope and the Devil quite well ; for there is 
 introduced into ' Cymbeline,' Act V., a scene adapted 
 to the pre-Christian period of that play, which is a 
 farcical imitation of the scene with the Devil in the 
 Vatican, down even to the anachronism of brimstone. 
 
 The apparitions around the sleeping Posthumus in 
 the fifth Act of ' Cymbeline ' have been a grief to all the 
 poet's admirers. Steevens went so far as to say that 
 they were an interpolation by a later hand, forgetting 
 that the oracje which Posthumus found pinned to his 
 breast when he awoke was an essential part of the 
 action. The joke begins with the name of Posthumus, 
 
 174 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ASSISTANT 
 
 the husband of Imogen. This name, a common one in 
 ancient Rome, is found in Holinshed's Chronicles, as the 
 name of the master of the camp of the Second Legion 
 in the wars of Boadicea. It is brought into Locrine 
 in the form of Posthumius, in the same context with 
 Imogen (or Innogen) herself, being carried backwards 
 into the legendary period of Brutus, first King of 
 Britain in descent from the Trojan fugitives. Barnes 
 knew that the proper name Posthumus might mean, 
 and probably did originally meanj a posthumous child. 
 This fancy had a great attraction for him, so that he 
 drags it into The Divil's Charter as if by force. In 
 Act IV. Scene iv. Caesar Borgia is about to put to death 
 the two boys of the Countess Katharine ; one of the 
 children exclaims, " Let me before I die but kiss my 
 mother," using the same " before I die " that was care- 
 fully constructed to be the " cue for the band " on Mr. 
 Crummies' s stage at Portsmouth. It is here the cue 
 for the little joke about " posthumous," for the Countess 
 answers with strained pathos : 
 
 What ! would'st thou run again into my womb ? 
 If thou wert there, thou should'st be Posthumus, 
 And ript out of my sides with soldiers' swords. 
 Before I would yield up thine heritage. 
 
 Barnes's cherished morsel of wit reappears in ' Cym- 
 beline,' in the opening scene. Of the father of the hero 
 it is said : 
 
 He served with glory and admired success, 
 
 So gain'd he the sur-addition Leonatus : 
 
 And had, besides this gentleman in question, 
 
 Two other sons, who in the wars b' the time 
 
 Died with their swords in hand : for which their father. 
 
 Then old and fond of issue, took such sorrow 
 
 That he quit being, and his gentle lady, 
 
 Big of this gentleman our theme, deceased 
 
 As he was born. The king, he takes the babe 
 
 To his protection, calls him Posthumus Leonatus, etc. 
 
 Although nothing follows from Posthumus having 
 175 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 been a posthumous child, yet this small piece of wit 
 turns up again in the prison scene of the Fifth Act 
 with much solemnity and circumstance. The ghost of 
 Posthumus' father appears, " an old man attired like a 
 warrior, leading in his hand an ancient matron, his wife, 
 and mother to Posthumus, with music before them : then, 
 after other music, follow the two young Leonati, brothers 
 to Posthumus, with wounds as they died in the wars. 
 They circle Posthumus round as he lies sleeping." Then 
 follow jingling verses, in the simple style of the old 
 mummeries. The old father says of Posthumus : 
 
 I died whilst in the womb he stay'd 
 Attending nature's law, etc. 
 
 The aged mother : 
 
 Lucina lent me not her aid, 
 
 But took me in my throwes ; 
 That from me was Posthumus ript, 
 
 Came crying 'mongst his foes. 
 A thing of pity ! — ■ 
 
 and so on, for eight more verses, the boys joining in 
 the jingle like ghostly mummers. Next comes another 
 elaborate stage direction : " Jupiter descends in thunder 
 and lightning sitting upon an eagle ; he throws a thunder- 
 bolt; the Ghosts fall on their knees." Jupiter then 
 delivers twenty-one lines of mock sublime verbiage and 
 reascends ; whereupon the old father says : 
 
 Sieil. He came in thunder ; his celestial breath 
 Was sulphurous to smell ; the holy eagle 
 Stoop'd as to foot us ; his ascension is 
 More sweet than our blest fields ; his royal bird 
 Prunes the immortal wing and cloys his beak 
 As when his god is pleased. 
 
 ■^11' Thanks, Jupiter ! 
 
 The descent of Jupiter is obviously burlesqued to take 
 off the apparition of the Devil to the Pope in Barnes's 
 tragedy: '■'■Fiery exhalations: lightning and thunder: 
 ascend a king with a red face, crowned imperial, riding 
 
 176 
 
HIS HAND IN « CYMBELINE ' 
 
 upon a lyon or dragon." Next, " he descends with thunder 
 and lightning, arid after more exhalations ascends another, 
 all in armour." And finally, " he descendeth with thunder." 
 The copy is so close that Jupiter's " celestial breath 
 was sulphurous to smell," although sulphur is not an 
 Olympian property. Another part of Barnes's scene 
 between the Devil and the Pope is : " He [the Devil] 
 bringeth from the same door Gismond Viselli, his 
 wounds gaping, and after him Lucrece [Lucrezia 
 Borgia] undrest, holding a dagger fixed in his bleeding 
 bosom. They vanish." This is the source of " with 
 wounds as they died in the wars," said of the ghosts 
 of the two young brothers of Posthumus. The prob- 
 able explanation of the mock-sublime and burlesque in 
 this scene is, that Shakespeare found these apparitions 
 in the draft of the play which had been prepared for him 
 by his " plotter," and that he let them stand, giving 
 them a ludicrous turn, because they were incapable of 
 being made truly pathetic. I conjecture that it was 
 the same plotter who invented the apparitions in 
 ' Macbeth," Act IV. Scene i. : the armed head, the 
 bloody child, the child crowned, with a tree in his 
 hand, the show of eight kings, the last with a glass in 
 his hand, and Banquo's ghost following. But in that 
 instance the author has done everything that language 
 can do to dignify the spectacular conceits of his assistant. 
 It will be observed that Barnes is singular in the 
 affectation "descendeth," "bringeth," etc., which is 
 found also in some of the stage-directions of Locrine, 
 Musedorus, and the old King Leir. It is found 
 also in the fifth Act of ' Cymbeline ' : "He 
 vanquisheth and disarmeth lachimo, and then 
 leaves him." This is some other hand than Shake- 
 speare's. There are, moreover, some other signs of 
 collaboration in ' Cymbeline.' The story of the wager 
 upon Imogen's chastity, and the artifice of the chest 
 in her bedroom, are taken from Boccaccio's ' Bernabo 
 Lomelin,' the ninth tale of the second day of the 
 
 177 N 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 Decamerone, the scene of the wager being changed 
 from Paris to Rome to suit the Roman-British period 
 of the play. There was no English translation of that 
 tale then published. Douce guesses that Shakespeare 
 may have " heard the novel read by some person in 
 English," or, as an alternative, that he read it in the 
 French version. Barnes must have had some knowledge 
 of languages to have written The DiviVs Charter, 
 although he was no more a " linguist " than he was a 
 " militarist " ; but he was a friend of the Italian John 
 Florio, and may have got his help. It is necessary to 
 carry the hypothesis of his collaboration even farther. 
 About the date of ' Cymbeline,' some one, either 
 Shakespeare himself or an assistant, had been reading 
 discursively in Holinshed's Chronicles. The stories of 
 King Lear and of Macbeth are found therein ; and in 
 the midst of the latter (pp. 155-56 of the Chronicle of 
 Scotland) is found the incident of the man and his sons, 
 the Hays, keeping the end of a barricaded lane, which 
 comes into the battle in the last Act of ' Cymbeline.' 
 Not only is the stage-direction " he vanquisheth and 
 disarmeth " Barnsian, but also some of the text ; for 
 example, these lines, which might have come from 
 The DiviPs Charter : 
 
 Athwart the lane, 
 He, with two striplings — lads more like to run 
 The country base than to commit such slaughter : 
 With faces fit for masks, or rather fairer 
 Than those for preservation cased, or shame, — 
 Made good the passage. 
 
 I suspect, also, that the idea of the cave at Milford 
 Haven came from Barnes, and that we should have 
 found the original of it in his lost tragedy The Battle 
 of Hexham, in the part relating to the fugitives in 
 Cumberland and Yorkshire after the battle. The part 
 of Imogen is held to be one of Shakespeare's highest 
 flights in the delineation of women ; but there is much 
 else in the play which is not of the same quality. 
 
 178 
 
HIS HAND IN 'CYMBELINE' 
 
 The hypothesis would be that he worked over a draft 
 by Barnes, keeping lines or passages here and there 
 which he had not the patience to alter, turning Barnes 
 into ridicule in the apparitions-scene in the fifth Act (as 
 he did in other plays designed by him), but giving his 
 own impress to so much of the play that it counts 
 justly among the greatest of his works. A similar 
 theory has been adopted by the late Mr. W. G. Clark 
 and Dr. Aldis Wright for the composition of ' Macbeth: ' 
 that " Shakespeare reserved to himself all the scenes in 
 which Macbeth or Lady Macbeth appeared, and left 
 the rest to his assistant. We must further suppose 
 that he largely retouched, and even rewrote in places, 
 this assistant's work." It is this assistant whom I 
 identify with Barnes, the author of Locrine and the 
 original of Pistol and ParoUes. 
 
 Note on the Date of 'All's Well that Ends Well' 
 
 Everything is conjectural, as nothing is heard of the play until 
 the folio of 1623 ; yet it was certainly acted, as the clown in one 
 place is addressed Monsieur Levatch, la Vache, the actor Cowley, 
 whose names occur in the list of King's players. May 1603. 
 Several proper names occur in the text, which point to a date 
 not earlier than about 1602-3, ^t^"^ probably not much later for the 
 first draft of the play. These are Escalus (1604), Corambus (1602), 
 the Muskos' regiment, the regiment of the Spinii. " Musko the 
 Gull " occurs in Satiromastix {1602) ; the Spinii are the satirists, 
 from spina, a thorn, according to Ben Jonson's heraldry for Marston 
 in The Poetaster (1601). The use of Campion's Epigrams (1602), 
 is another proof. The references to Dumaine are specially sug- 
 gestive, but they do not imply a date necessarily later than 1598. 
 Coleridge, Tieck, Verplanck, and others have detected two periods 
 of composition, but they are not agreed among themselves which 
 are the earlier and which the later portions. There is some evidence 
 that ' Cymbeline ' and ' All's Well ' were under hand about the 
 same time. A motive discarded from the Boccaccio story of the 
 latter is utilised for the former, just as the sailless and rudderless 
 boat of Greene's Pandosto is discarded from ' Winter's Tale ' 
 but used for 'The Tempest.' The motive I refer to is the in- 
 timacy between Beltramo and Giletta (Helena) as boy and girl, so 
 that they became lovers inevitably ; this is dropped in ' All's 
 Well,' but is taken up and expanded in ' Cymbeline,' where 
 
 179 
 
BARNABE BARNES 
 
 Posthumus and Imogen had been bred up together from childhood. 
 Imogen says (I. i. 145) : 
 
 It is your fault that I have loved Posthumus : 
 Vou bred him as my playfellow, and he is 
 A man worth any woman, overbuys me 
 Almost the sum he pays. 
 
 The Countess of Rousillon says very nearly the same of Helena : 
 " Her father bequeathed her to me . . . there is more owing to her 
 than is paid j and more shall be paid her than she'll demand." 
 Other points in common between the two plays are the likeness of 
 Cloten to Parolles ; and a peculiar use of the word "scarre " in the 
 sense of knot, a dialect word still in use among sailors or fishermen 
 both as a noun and a verb, and evidently a form of scarve or scarfe, 
 meaning to splice : in Scotland it is sounded " scaire." ' Cymbeline ' 
 is one of the last group of plays ; and so I should take ' All's Well 
 that End's Well ' to be. If the critics are right in detecting two 
 periods of writing in it, I should place the first about 1602-4, 
 and the second about 1609-10. In view of the grim humour of it, 
 it is not easy to understand how it should have ever been dated 
 before 1598, as those date it who identify it with the comedy called 
 ' Love's Labour's Won,' in Meres's list of that year (see p. 143). 
 
 180 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 SOUTHAMPTON AS A SUCCESSFUL POET 
 
 In ' The Tempest ' Antonio must have had the ability 
 to "execute the outward face of royalty" as Prospero's 
 substitute, or he could not have " played his part " with 
 success. In the hypothesis of Southampton, as the 
 " ivy which had hid my princely trunk," or " the 
 screen " between Shakespeare and the public, he must 
 have had both ability and ambition to be an author, or 
 he is not the original of Antonio and there is no 
 literary allegory in the story of political usurpation. It 
 is indeed implied that Antonio, when he " expelled 
 remorse and nature," was conscious of some right, 
 otherwise his conduct would not have been called pitiless, 
 as if he were exacting no more than was his due. 
 It is not so difficult to show that Southampton had the 
 ability, and that he was gifted specially with imagina- 
 tion. In a dedication to him in 1594 Nash calls him 
 " a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of 
 poets as of the poets themselves. Incomprehensible is 
 the height of your spirit, both in heroical resolution and 
 matters of conceit." About the same date his romantic 
 bearing during one of the Queen's progresses led to his 
 being compared with the famous paladin Sir Bevis of 
 Hampton. In a letter of the same year his " fantastical " 
 disposition is given as a reason why the Lady Bridget 
 Manners, sister of his dearest friend Lord Rutland, was 
 unwilling to entertain the project of a marriage with 
 him. Florio, who was his tutor in Italian and had lived 
 
 181 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS A SUCCESSFUL POET 
 
 in his " pay and patronage some years," addressing 
 him in the dedication of his World of Wordes (1598), 
 is very explicit. He specifies " your studies, your 
 conceits, your exercise : your studies, much in all, 
 most in Italian excellence ; your conceits, by under- 
 standing others, to work above them in your own ; your 
 exercise, to read what the world's best wits have 
 written and to speak as they write." Gifted with 
 imagination, it would have been nothing unusual in 
 that age if he had actually turned poet, as Surrey, 
 Sidney, Dyer, Sackville, Greville, Raleigh had done. 
 But there is not a scrap of verse with Southampton's 
 name. The only known production of his pen is his 
 college Latin essay written when he was thirteen, which 
 is said to be of excellent penmanship, and does not 
 suggest poetic ideals by its theme — that all men are 
 incited to the study of virtue by the hope of reward. 
 
 Yet it is morally certain that Southampton was the 
 anonymous author of a very successful poem, which 
 went through six editions between 1594 and 1631. 
 This was the work, not unknown to Shakespearian 
 students, called Willobie his Avisa. It is made quite 
 clear by the prefaces to the first and second editions 
 that the ascription of it to one Henry Willobie was an 
 elaborate joke ; it was indeed referred to, in a work of 
 1596, as "a pamphlet by an unknown author," or by 
 one who desired to be unknown. The authorship was 
 probably an open secret, and by internal evidence alone 
 it is not difficult to bring it home to Southampton with 
 a high degree of certainty. Not only the novelty of 
 this proof, but also the radical importance of it for the 
 hypothesis that Shakespeare's patron had been his col- 
 laborator in certain of the plays, makes it incumbent 
 upon me to be more particular than I could wish to be 
 for the reader's sake. First it will be shown that the 
 poem grew out of 'The Rape of Lucrece,* published 
 a few months before, and that one W. S., admitted to be 
 Shakespeare, was the author's " familiar " and " faithful " 
 
 182 
 
'WILLOBIE HIS AVISA' 
 
 friend and adviser. Next, the localities will be identified 
 in a certain part of Lord Southampton's county, Hamp- 
 shire, and the heroine, Avisa, identified as the barmaid 
 of one inn and the hostess of another. Besides the 
 pointed and unmistakable introduction of W. S., there 
 are three other persons introduced who can be shown 
 to correspond with certain of his lordship's protigis or 
 friends, the clearest case being Roger Earl of Rutland, 
 who is identified with Rogero by one piece of wit in 
 the text and another on the margin. 
 
 The success of Willobie his Avisa was so consider- 
 able, its vogue lasting for more than a generation, that 
 we naturally ask what it was due to. Probably not 
 solely to its merits, although these are not to be denied. 
 The mystification about the authorship, which is made 
 the most of in two prefaces, or the open secret of the 
 authorship in some circles, may account in part for its 
 numerous editions. A dexterous wit, and a suspicion 
 of irony or playful satire, together with a total absence 
 of fine writing or straining at effect, are its real merits. 
 But, except in two or three cantos near the beginning, 
 which were probably Shakespeare's, it is never sensuous 
 and impassioned, but always analytical and reasoned. 
 The rhymes are often forced, and in some stanzas 
 doggerel unashamed. The structure is so haphazard 
 that the theme is exhausted in the first twenty -two 
 cantos, and has to begin again upon a new tack. The 
 moral of the barmaid's or landlady's indomitable chastity 
 keeps its interest, and a certain degree of humour, by 
 varying the circumstances, but it has no dramatic climax. 
 At the same time the idea of the poem is original and 
 unconventional ; so much so that Heywood paid it the 
 compliment of borrowing it with little disguise for the 
 initial plot of one of his best-known plays. The Fair 
 Maid of the West (Part I.). 
 
 Shakespeare's name is introduced into the poem at 
 the very outset ; this is indeed the first mention of 
 it by a contemporary, and is therefore well known : 
 
 183 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS A SUCCESSFUL POET 
 
 Though Collatine have dearly bought 
 
 To high renown a lasting life, 
 
 And found — that most in vain have sought 
 
 To have — a fair and constant wife ; 
 Yet Tarquin pluckt his glistering grape, 
 And Shake-speare paints poor Lucrece rape. 
 
 The intention is not to compliment the author of 
 • Lucrece,' but to connect the one poem with the other, 
 Avisa is an English heroine of more than Roman virtue, 
 or at all events of more effectual virtue than the heroine 
 of classical antiquity. The obvious intention of the 
 poem Is to be a skit upon Shakespeare's tragic piece. 
 The satirical humour of it is so marked that it was 
 included in an order of the year 1599 by the Archbishop 
 of Canterbury and the Bishop of London against the 
 satires of the day, but with the difference that Willobies 
 Advisa was only "to be called in," while the others 
 were to be burned. Avisa is assailed first in her 
 country bar-parlour by a young nobleman, whom she 
 repels with the good-nature of a ready-witted barmaid, 
 but with such spirit that she threatens at length to stick a 
 knife into him. The nobleman,/ar^»j, forgets his nobility 
 and breaks out in a torrent of abuse upon her humble 
 station. Then begins the Second Temptation of Avisa, 
 after her marriage, by ruffians, roysterers, young gentle- 
 men, and lusty captains, " which all she quickly casts off." 
 She is now the landlady of a hostelry in a busy town, 
 where her far-famed beauty attracts many. It Is again 
 the nobleman who leads the attack, under the new 
 character of an Italian cavallero. He is followed by a 
 pious Frenchman, who carries on his suit through eleven 
 cantos. To him succeeds an Anglo-German pedant In 
 ten cantos. Then the nobleman reappears for the 
 second time, as a combination of Italian and Spaniard, 
 but at the same time expressly identified with the 
 author himself under his initials H. W. Before the 
 last assault on Avisa begins, at Canto 44, the author 
 pauses in the midst of his verse to introduce a prose 
 
 184 
 
ADVISED BY SHAKESPEARE 
 
 passage, in which he relates the inception, progress, and 
 conclusion of his task under the medical allegory of an 
 attack of the infection or plague. 
 
 The plague had been the common topic in London 
 during the two preceding years. It was so prevalent 
 in the capital from the summer of 1592 until the 
 winter of 1593 that the theatres were closed all that 
 long period but for a short season of six weeks at and 
 after Christmas 1592 ; we know this on the excellent 
 authority of the diary of Philip Henslowe, who was the 
 , proprietor of one or more playhouses. 
 
 It was in that enforced vacation that Shakespeare 
 wrote his 'Venus and Adonis,' dedicating it in the 
 spring of 1593 to Lord Southampton, and promising 
 his lordship "to take advantage of all idle hours till 
 I have honoured you with some graver labour " — a 
 promise which he fulfilled with ' Lucrece ' in the spring 
 of 1594. Willobie his Avisa followed in the autumn 
 of the same year ; so that it was either written in haste 
 or the author knew enough of Shakespeare's poem 
 before it was published to have conceived the project of 
 a mild satire upon the same theme. The history of its 
 composition is thus given by the author in his allegorical 
 way : — 
 
 H. W, being suddenly affected with the contagion of a 
 fantastical fit at the first sight of A. [Avisa], pineth a while in 
 secret grief; at length not able any longer to endure the 
 burning heat of so fervent a humour, bewrayeth the secrecy of 
 his disease unto his familiar friend W. S., who not long before 
 had tried the courtesy of the like passion, and was now newly 
 recovered of the infection. Yet, finding his friend let blood 
 in the same vein, he [W. S.] took pleasure for a time to see 
 him bleed, and instead of stopping the issue he enlargeth the 
 wound with the sharp razor of a willing conceit, persuading 
 him that he thought it a matter very easy to be compassed, 
 and no doubt with pain, diligence and some cost, in time to be 
 obtained. Thus this miserable comforter comforting his friend 
 with an impossibility ; either for that he now would secretly 
 laugh at his friend's folly that had given occasion not long 
 
 18s 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS A SUCCESSFUL POET 
 
 before unto others to laugh at his own, or because he would 
 see whether another could play his part better than himself, 
 and in viewing afar oiF the course of this loving comedy he 
 determined to see whether it would sort to a happier end for 
 this new actor than it did for the old player. But at length 
 this comedy was like to have grown to a tragedy by the weak 
 and feeble estate that H. W. was brought unto by a desperate 
 view of an impossibility of obtaining his purpose ; till Time 
 and Necessity, being his best physicians, brought him a plaster, 
 if not to heal, yet in part to ease his malady. In all which 
 discourse is lively represented the unruly rage of unbridled 
 fancy, having the reins to rove at liberty ; with the divers and 
 sundry changes of alFections and temptations, which Will, set 
 loose from Reason, can devise, etc. 
 
 In this apologue the relations of parties are exactly 
 those that would have subsisted between Shakespeare, 
 or W. S., and his young patron, H. W., Henry 
 Wriothesley, Lord Southampton. The latter ostensibly 
 calls in his familiar and faithful friend in order to help 
 him in his suit to Avisa, the two cantos, 47 and 49, 
 being the advice of W. S., and headed with these initials. 
 There is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare wrote 
 them ; but there is a poem of his, No. 1 9 of the minor 
 poems from 'The Passionate Pilgrim' (1599), which 
 is upon the same theme (as well as in the same stanza 
 and metre), beginning — 
 
 Whenas thine eye hath chosen the dame 
 And stall'd the deer that thou should'st strike. 
 Let Reason rule things worthy blame 
 As well as Fancy, partial wight. 
 
 Take counsel of some wiser head, 
 
 Neither too young, nor yet unwed. 
 
 It is not likely that these verses were ever meant for 
 publication; some one must have given them to Jaggard, 
 the publisher, along with various other surreptitiously 
 obtained things, including two of the Sonnets, which 
 are the most compromising to Shakespeare's reputation 
 and were almost certainly meant to damage it at the 
 time they were printed. It is known also that Nash, 
 
 186 
 
ADVISED BY SHAKESPEARE 
 
 who had been on a visit to Lord Southampton (perhaps 
 in Hampshire during the plague in London), wrote 
 for him in the same year (1594) a poem on the 
 same theme, The Choosing of Valentines, which has been 
 prudently left unpublished (all but a f&w harmless 
 lines extracted by Grosart). It will be observed that 
 Shakespeare's opening stanza upon Reason controlling 
 Fancy is exactly the converse of the theme with which 
 H. W. concludes his prose passage — " the unruly rage 
 of unbridled fancy," or "Will set loose from Reason " ; 
 and that is also an underlying idea or moral of the 
 whole poem. 
 
 So far as concerns the actual pursuit of Avisa, the 
 counsel of W. S. is of little moment. It is in the 
 allegory of the " fantastical fit " of contagion that his 
 skill and experience are enlarged upon ; and there, it 
 is clear, his advice is sought and given as the writer of 
 love-poems by which H. W. had been "infected," 
 the author who had lately made his mark with ' Venus 
 and Adonis ' and ' The Rape of Lucrece.' It is 
 humorously implied, no doubt, that W. S. had been 
 himself a gay dog, that he was an old hand at love 
 affairs ; and the soft impeachment is admitted in the 
 " wiser head, neither too young nor yet unwed," of 
 Shakespeare's own verses. But H. W.'s account of 
 his familiar friend is clearly meant as banter ; the 
 addiction of a sober and thoughtful man to Ovidian 
 subjects was a fair subject for a jest, and was even 
 thrown at him in earnest, as in the lines in The Return 
 from Parnassus: 
 
 Could but a graver subject him content. 
 Without love's foolish, lazy languishment ! 
 
 Drayton also aims a pleasantry of the same kind at 
 some one who must have been recognised. The 
 shepherd Rowland is relating to a group of shepherds 
 (or poets) the tale of the Man in the Moon ; that 
 
 187 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS A SUCCESSFUL POET 
 
 personage, with his lanthorn, looked into many dark 
 corners of the earth, 
 
 " And not long since, besides this, did behold 
 Some of you here, when you should tend your fold 
 A' nights, were wenching : thus he doth me tell." 
 With that they all in such a laughter fell 
 That the field rang. 
 
 H. W.'s humour is all the better if it be not taken as 
 wholly allegorical; but of course it would have been 
 neither witty nor decent to publish as matter of fact, 
 or literally, that W. S. had " lately tried the courtesy 
 of the like passion," that he had not long before given 
 occasion to laugh at his "folly," and that the "old 
 player " had come off indifferently well In some 
 "loving comedy." The medical figures of speech leave 
 no doubt as to the literary nature of the escapade. 
 H. W.'s attack of the contagion was a "fantastical 
 fit," or a fit of fancy. W,, S. when called in, found 
 him already the subject of phlebotomy ; instead of 
 stopping the flow, he let him bleed, and even enlarged 
 the opening in the vein " with the sharp razor of a 
 willing conceit." The malady was at length eased, if 
 not cured, by the application of a plaster, which is a 
 not inapt figure for the flat ending of the poem. The 
 meaning of this humorous parable is, that Southampton 
 began the poem on his own initiative, and that 
 Shakespeare, when told of it, encouraged him in it, 
 and gave him some advice, but left him for the most 
 part to his own resources. If I can trust my diagnosis 
 in such a matter, Shakespeare wrote the whole of certain 
 cantos near the beginning, but none after the 13 th. 
 Canto 3, which is Avisa's spirited rejoinder to the first 
 assault of the young nobleman, is altogether superior in 
 style to the two that precede and the two that follow it. 
 The same abler pen strikes one in Canto 6, which is 
 this time the nobleman's address ; and one seems to 
 find traces of it in the three in succession, 11 to 13, 
 which describe his rage at being repulsed, and Avisa's 
 
 188 
 
'AVISA' A MYSTIFICATION 
 
 gentle firmness with him. The only other parts of the 
 poem in which one may suspect Shakespeare's co- 
 operation are the sections given to the pious Frenchman, 
 who justifies himself by the precedents of David and 
 Solomon, and to the pedantic German, who cites the 
 authority of the ancients in favour of conjugal infidelity 
 at large ; and these, I should suppose, had been the 
 occasion of a good deal of fun between the two friends, 
 especially in respect to the real persons taken off 
 (Barnabe Barnes and Gabriel Harvey). 
 
 The ascription of Avisa to one Henry Willobie 
 is so obviously a mystification, that one might well be 
 spared the demonstration of the joke. But as every one 
 in our time appears to have taken it seriously, and the 
 Dictionary of National Biography has devoted an article 
 to "WiUoughby, or Willobie, Henry (i574?-i596 ?), 
 the eponymous hero of the poem Willobie' s Avisa" 
 I have no choice but to analyse this pleasantry with due 
 solemnity. The alleged eponymous hero was the second 
 son of Henry WiUoughby, a Wiltshire gentleman, by 
 
 Jane, daughter of Dauntrey, Esquire, of Lavington, 
 
 Wiltshire. The pedigree has been the subject of 
 industrious research by several. This WiUoughby, or 
 "WiUabie," matriculated from St. John's College, 
 Oxford, on loth December 1 591, at the age of sixteen, 
 and proceeded B.A. from Exeter College on 28 th 
 February 1595. On the other hand, the author (also 
 the "eponymous hero") of Avisa had gone abroad 
 upon the Queen's service previous to the ist October 
 1 594, according to the statement of his chamber-fellow 
 " Hadrian DorreU," writing from Oxford on that date. 
 Young Willobie, it appears, was a " scholar of a very 
 good hope," but having a desire to see foreign countries, 
 he had gone abroad, leaving certain papers in the hands 
 of his friend. Avisa was in his own handwriting, 
 and was thought probably to be his own composition ; 
 DorreU had ventured to print it, but he was not sure 
 how Willobie would "take this boldness both in the 
 
 189 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS A SUCCESSFUL POET 
 
 publishing and naming of it." Before the second 
 edition, Willobie was fortunately dead, so that those 
 who had been raising inconvenient questions "must 
 rest until the Author, now of late gone to God, return 
 from Heaven to satisfie them farder touching his mean- 
 ing. And so farewell. Oxford, this 30 of June 1596. 
 Thine to use. Hadrian Dorrell." In another part 
 of the second edition it is stated with equal biographical 
 impressiveness : " This poetical fiction was penned by 
 the Author at least for thirty and five years since (as it 
 will be proved), and lay in waste papers in his study, as 
 many other pretty things did of his devising." One of 
 these was a poem upon the cognate theme of Susanna 
 and the Elders, to which the author refers in the follow- 
 ing remarkable stanza of his introductory canto : 
 
 Then Avis-Susan join in one ; 
 Let Lucrece-Avis be thy name : 
 The English Eagle soars alone 
 And far surmounts all other fame. 
 
 Wh'er high or low, wh'er great or small. 
 
 This Britain Bird outflies them all. 
 
 Perhaps enough has been said to show the high 
 spirits in which Willobie his Jvisa was conceived and 
 executed ; and I shall pass to the real localities and 
 persons of it, with one more citation from the Dictionary 
 of National Biography : " The frivolous tone in which 
 W. S. is made in Avisa to refer [i"] to his recent amorous 
 adventure suggests, moreover, that the professed tone 
 of pain which characterises the poet's addresses to a 
 disdainful mistress, in his Sonnets, is not to be inter- 
 preted quite seriously." ^ 
 
 ' For example, S. 148 : 
 
 O me ! what eyes hath love put in my head, 
 Which have no correspondence with true sight ? 
 Or, if they have, where is my judgement fled, 
 That censures falsely what they see aright ? 
 . . . O how can love's eye be true 
 That is so vex'd with watching and with tears ? 
 No marvel, then, though I mistake my view ; 
 The sun itself sees not till heaven clears. 
 190 
 
'AVISA' ANONYMOUS 
 
 Let us now see what was said of Willohie his Avisa 
 in the first year or two after its publication. The book 
 itself had given, in a preface, a plain hint to look below 
 the surface for real persons and real places. Attention 
 is called to " the exact description " of Avisa's birth- 
 place, " her country, the place of her abode, and such 
 other circumstances. . . . We think it is a matter 
 almost impossible, that any man could invent all this 
 without some ground or foundation to build on. . . . 
 Though the matter be handled poetically, yet there is 
 something under these feigned names and shows that 
 have done truly." It appears from the Apology pre- 
 fixed to the second edition that readers had not been 
 slow to follow this hint, although it is now expedient 
 to repudiate the result : — "These fancies, forsooth, have 
 framed names to letters, of their own devices ; and they 
 have imagined places of their own placing so fitly for 
 every description that they shall needs enforce the author 
 to speak of them whom he never knew, to aim at their 
 fancies whose faces he never saw, and to cipher their 
 names whose natures to him were ignorant and strange." 
 But "they must for ever rest in their rightless erring 
 till the Author (now of late gone to God) return from 
 Heaven," etc. — by which irony the mystification is of 
 course confessed. Therefore, in a work of the year 
 1596, just before the second edition of Avisa, that 
 poem was said to be by " an unknown author," or, in 
 other words, the name of Henry Willobie was fictitious, 
 concealing an identity which was probably known, but 
 was publicly spoken of as unknown according to the 
 etiquette of such matters. This statement came from 
 Peter Coles, a young scholar from Dorsetshire, who 
 had been engaged in translating and paraphrasing into 
 English verse all the passages in the Odyssey relating 
 to Penelope and the suitors. He took advantage 
 of the lead given him by Avisa, just as Avisa had 
 followed the lead of 'Lucrece,' either to write his 
 Homeric paraphrases or to get them brought out ; and, 
 
 191 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS A SUCCESSFUL POET 
 
 by way of recommendation, he got his very dear friend 
 S. D. to write a copy of Latin verses, in which Penelope 
 is contrasted with Avisa, greatly to the advantage of the 
 former. One may take it that S. D. was the well-known 
 scholar and ppet Samuel Daniel, who came from near 
 Taunton, was a likely person to have befriended the 
 young Dorset scholar in London, and may have helped 
 him to proceed at length to Oxford, where he matricu- 
 lated three years after, at the mature age of twenty-six.^ 
 S. D.'s testimony about Avisa, presumably from 
 personal knowledge, is that she was an obscure person 
 born in an obscure place, that she was a daughter of the 
 tavern and became the wife of an innkeeper {conjux 
 cauponis, filia pandochet), that she was by no means so 
 diligent as the illustrious Penelope at her distaff, and 
 that she would probably not have held out as many 
 days against her suitors as Penelope withstood them for 
 years. As to Avisa's upbringing at one public-house 
 and her married life at another, S. D. does but confirm 
 what we may infer from the poem itself. In her married 
 station she lived at a house which bore " the sign of Eng- 
 land's saint " — the George and Dragon — in a busy town 
 at a stirring time : as one of her suitors bluntly told her. 
 
 The time and place will not permit 
 That you can long here spotless sit. 
 
 Before her marriage she had been living in the country 
 exposed to the public gaze in like manner : 
 
 And there she dwells in public eye, 
 Shut up from none that list to see : 
 She answers all that list to try. 
 Both high and low of each degree. 
 
 But few that come but feel her dart. 
 
 And try her well ere they depart. 
 
 1 The editor of A'visa in our time, Dr. Grosart, was " morally certain " 
 that S. D. was not Samuel Daniel ; but he gives no reasons against, and 
 does not suggest who else S. D. could have been. In the Oxford lists there 
 are only three others with those initials who are early enough for the date, 
 1 596 J but these are all otherwise unknown and unlikely names. Commenda- 
 tory verses would have been of no use unless their author were somebody. 
 
 192 
 
KNOWN BY HIS HEROINE 
 
 When this maid of the inn was married the rumour 
 soon spread that " beauty's wonder " had come " from 
 country hills in towns to dwell." S. D.'s contrast of 
 her with Penelope was literally adopted by the poem 
 itself, in a supplementary canto by " Thomas WiUoby, 
 frater Henrici Willoby nuper defuncti" : 
 
 Penelope sprang from noble house. 
 By noble match twice noble made : 
 Avisa both by sire and spouse 
 Was link'd to men of meanest trade. 
 
 She was a real person, who bore the pretty English 
 name of Avis. In turning it into Avisa the author 
 playfully suggests that it was derived from a privative, 
 and visa seen — " never was such a woman scene as here 
 is described." Another suggestion is avis, a bird, more 
 particularly the bird of St. John the Evangelist ; while 
 the two etymologies, and perhaps name and surname, 
 are combined in " our Not-seene Bird." 
 
 The author's " exact description " of localities enables 
 us to fix the scene, or scenes, in which his real barmaid 
 or hostess lived and moved. First the place and 
 circumstances of her birth are described : 
 
 At western side of Albion's isle 
 
 Where Austin pitcht his monkish tent, 
 
 Where Shepherds sing, where Muses smile, 
 
 The Graces met with one consent 
 To frame each one in sundry part 
 Some cunning work to shew their art. 
 
 This is puzzling at first sight to a modern reader, 
 because, in strict history, St. Austin pitched his 
 " monkish " tent nowhere but in Kent. However, 
 it was long believed, and is even stated in authoritative 
 works still current, that he founded also Glastonbury 
 in the west. Somerset is a county that may be said to 
 be on the due western side of the island — neither south- 
 west nor north-west, as we now divide the regions 
 from Greenwich ; and Glastonbury, as Dr. Ingleby has 
 
 193 o 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS A SUCCESSFUL POET 
 
 perceived, is the place that suits the particulars in the 
 text best,^ However, it matters nothing where Avisa 
 was born. We move at once away from her western 
 birthplace towards the place, at some little distance, 
 where she was living when she first encountered the 
 young nobleman : 
 
 Not far from thence there lies a vale, 
 
 A rosy vale in pleasant plain ; 
 
 The Nymphs frequent this happy dale. 
 
 Old Helicon revives again. 
 
 Here Muses sing, here Satyrs play. 
 Here mirth resounds both night and day. 
 
 This is only a stage on the way to Avisa's dwelling- 
 place ; but, meanwhile, what is meant by bringing in 
 this rosy vale, the haunt of nymphs and satyrs, the seat 
 of the Muses, the English Helicon ? It happened that 
 there had been published just a year before, in 1593, 
 Michael Drayton's Nine Eclogues, the sixth of which is 
 occupied mainly with an extravagant eulogy of sixteen 
 stanzas (afterwards cut down to three, and moderated 
 in tone) upon the Countess of Pembroke, who is 
 declared to have inherited " the secret of his skill " 
 from her more famous brother. Sir Philip Sidney, and 
 is pictured as living in that Arcadia which he had 
 created for her — "the glorious light and lodestar of 
 our West." Then comes a very strained compliment : 
 
 The flood of Helicon forspent and dry. 
 
 Her source decay'd with foul oblivion. 
 
 The fountain flows again in thee alone, 
 
 Where Muses now their thirst may satisfy ; 
 And old Apollo, from Parnassus hill, 
 May in this spring refresh his droughty quill. 
 
 ' In Heywood's Fair Maid of the West, which is based closely upon 
 Avisa, the heroine's well-born lover is remonstrated with by his friend : 
 
 s Come, I must tell you, you forget yourself: 
 One of your birth and breeding thus to dote 
 Upon a tanner's daughter ! Why, her father 
 Sold hides in Somersetshire, and being trade-fallen 
 Sent her to service [in an inn at Plymouth]. 
 
 194 
 
HAMPSHIRE SCENES 
 
 This extravagance could hardly have passed without 
 remark, and was almost certainly the occasion of H. W.'s 
 line, "Old Helicon revives again," and of his other 
 Arcadian imagery. The rosy vale in pleasant plain was 
 therefore Wilton, which is not incorrectly described by 
 the phrase. But we are not yet come to Avisa's home ; 
 Wilton is only a place in its vicinity, singled out for 
 remark both because it is in the direct line and because 
 all the world knew this modern Arcady. Avisa's home 
 is a little farther east : 
 
 At east of this a castle stands, 
 By ancient Shepherds built of old, 
 And lately was in Shepherds' hands. 
 Though now by brothers bought and sold. 
 
 By shepherds he means bishops, as in the phrase, 
 " shepherd and bishop of our souls," therefore an 
 ancient ecclesiastical castle, lately alienated from the 
 Church, " bought and sold " by certain brothers. 
 
 This is a very precise account ; there cannot have 
 been many castles of churchmen in the west country or 
 in Hampshire answering to these particulars ; so far 
 as I can find there was only one, namely Merdon, an 
 ancient castle and manor of the Bishops of Winchester, 
 some twenty miles to the east of Wilton (the manor 
 being better known as the parish of Hursley, of which 
 Keble was vicar). Its alienation from the see of Win- 
 chester after the Reformation was a somewhat celebrated 
 instance. In 1551, Sir Philip Hoby, an adroit states- 
 man, obtained the grant of it from Edward VI., with 
 the connivance of the then bishop Poinet. But he did 
 not enter at once into possession, and meanwhile Queen 
 Mary came to the throne, and restored Bishop Gardiner 
 to his see, who in 1554 declared the alienation of 
 Merdon to be null. Sir Philip Hoby, however, became 
 loyal to Queen Mary as he had been to her Protestant 
 predecessor, and succeeded in recapturing Merdon, 
 which was confirmed to him by statute on the 9th of 
 
 195 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS A SUCCESSFUL POET 
 
 May 1558. He died three weeks after ; and it needed 
 another statute, of the ist of Elizabeth (1559) to 
 renew and confirm the grant to his half-brother, William 
 Hoby, who entered into possession. Whether these 
 brothers "bought " this church property by some bribe, 
 or bribes, cannot of course be proved ; but it is known 
 that grants of the kind were not always made out of 
 pure favour, or without some consideration ; and in 
 this case so many obstacles were thrown in the way of 
 the alienation, that it must have needed some money to 
 overcome them. William Hoby occupied the habitable 
 wing of the old castle of Merdon until the new mansion, 
 Hursley Lodge (long the residence of Richard Cromwell, 
 ex-Protector) was built. He was succeeded by his son 
 Giles, who sold the castle and manor to his father- 
 in-law. Sir Thomas Clarke, a Berkshire knight who is 
 supposed to have been in occupation of the half-ruinous 
 edifice in 1602. The somewhat remarkable history of 
 this old castle of the Bishops of Winchester suits the 
 details in the poem well enough, including the curious 
 fact that it was " by brothers bought and sold " ; and 
 no other castle of that locality, or of the west generally, 
 seems to suit them at all. One other detail suits 
 Merdon Castle — a famous well, said to be deeper than 
 that of Carisbrooke. It is still in existence, being 
 situated in what would have been the old courtyard of 
 the castle ; only one piece of ruin remains, on the north 
 of the well, while a grass-grown mound of fallen walls 
 bounds the central area on the east. The well is there- 
 fore on the western side of the ruin as it can still be 
 traced in its continuity (two sides of a square) ; and 
 that is the position assigned to the well in the poem : 
 
 At west side springs a crystal well. 
 There doth this chaste Avisa dwell. 
 And there she dwells in public eye, etc. 
 
 This does not necessarily mean that she dwelt actually 
 by the well on the west side of the castle. The meaning 
 
 196 
 
SUGGESTIONS OF WINCHESTER 
 
 is rather that the old castle, of which various marks 
 of identity are given, including the famous deep well 
 on its western side, is the best guide to the locality of 
 the country inn. We have to think rather of a public- 
 house on the nearest highway, which would be about 
 half-a-mile to the east, at a hamlet where the high- 
 road from Winchester to Romsey turns southwards to 
 skirt Hursley Park. There is still another stanza of 
 particulars about Avisa's family : 
 
 Along this plain there lies a down 
 Where shepherds feed their frisking flocks : 
 Her sire the mayor of the town, 
 A lovely shoot of ancient stock. 
 
 Full twenty years she lived a maid, 
 
 And never was by man betrayed. 
 
 It is an obvious disadvantage of conveying prosaic 
 details in rhymed verse, that the doggerel will not 
 construe with absolute certainty. If her sire were the 
 mayor of the town, how was it that she was living in a 
 public-house, among "country hills," near to an old 
 castle, which is about three miles distant from Win- 
 chester on the east and about four from Romsey on 
 the west.? Again, why introduce the sheep-down.? 
 A key is needed for these seeming irrelevancies or 
 inconsistencies. The meaning may be that " her sire 
 the mayor of the town " was her grandsire, and we 
 may be instructed to take " sire " in that sense by the 
 parenthesis which follows, that she was " a lovely shoot 
 of ancient stock." It is the halting verse and rhyme 
 that make these obscurities. The nearest town to 
 Merdon is Winchester : the most common name among 
 the mayors of that city at the time was Bird, Richard 
 Bird having been mayor three times, and Anthony Bird 
 twice, between 1571 and 1599. There are some half- 
 dozen passages in the introductory or supplementary 
 stanzas and prose matter in which Avisa is called a 
 bird, by way of punning upon her name ; and in one 
 of these there is a suggestion of both a baptismal name, 
 
 197 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS A SUCCESSFUL POET 
 
 a-visa not seen, and a surname avis a bird, " our Not- 
 seene Bird," as if her name had been Avis Bird. But if 
 Mr. Mayor Bird had been her grandfather, he may 
 have been her maternal grandfather, and Bird her 
 mother's name ; so that Avis Bird may have been only 
 an ideal combination, not far removed from the reality. 
 It is said that she 
 
 Was named Avisa by decree, 
 
 That name and nature might agree, — 
 
 which may mean that her parents christened her Avis 
 because her surname was Bird, or that the author joined 
 a punning name to a real surname, or a punning surname 
 to a real baptismal name, so as to be able to exercise his 
 somewhat boyish wit upon them. 
 
 Thus far the clues to Avisa's dwelling-place. Start- 
 ing from her birthplace on the western side of the 
 island (Glastonbury), we come to the Arcady and 
 Helicon of the modern world (Wilton), and thence 
 eastwards to an ancient bishops' castle, which had 
 lately been alienated from the Church to certain brothers, 
 and is further distinguished by its well (Merdon). 
 Thus the scene is laid in Hampshire, not far from 
 Winchester. The suspicion that H. W., the familiar 
 friend of W. S., was none other than Henry Wriothesley, 
 Earl of Southampton, is thus strengthened by the 
 discovery — which I take to be a certainty — that the 
 heroine is an innkeeper's barmaid in Southampton's 
 own county, not far from his residence in the town 
 of Southampton (Bugle Hall), or from his principal 
 seat at Titchfield, or near to Winchester on the way to 
 these. He himself suits exactly the situation of the 
 young nobleman whose attentions to Avisa at the 
 country inn occupy the first thirteen cantos. Then 
 she is married, and becomes the hostess of, the George 
 and Dragon in a busy town, frequented by " ruffians, 
 roysterers, young gentlemen, and lusty captains," where 
 she has to parry the attacks of " thousands." We have 
 
 198 
 
A HAMPSHIRE INN 
 
 no such minute clue to the identity of this town as we 
 have to her pre-nuptial dwelling-place. But it may be 
 assumed to have been in the same county : 
 
 When flying fame began to tell 
 
 How beauty's wonder was return'd 
 
 From country hills in towns to dwell, 
 
 With special gifts and grace adorn'd, 
 Of suitors store there might you see, 
 And some were men of high degree. 
 
 This might have been Southampton, which was often 
 filled with roysterers, young gentlemen, and lusty 
 captains in those years, several expeditions under Lord 
 Essex having sailed from it between 1589 and 1594. But 
 it might equally well have been some town on the road 
 to Southampton, such as Winchester or Basingstoke, at 
 each of which there was an inn with the "sign of 
 England's saint," the George and Dragon. 
 
 In 1636, a full generation after the date of the 
 poem, John Taylor, the versatile waterman, published a 
 catalogue of all the inns and taverns (to the number of 
 some nine hundred) in the ten home counties, with the 
 names of the licence-holders (male and female) and a 
 good many of the signs ; he professes to have collected 
 the information himself, so that it can hardly have been 
 corrected down to the date of pubUcation, as a modern 
 directory would be. The name of Avis occurs in this 
 catalogue twice — as a man's surname, Thomas Avis, at 
 the Bell, South Mimms, Middlesex ; and as a woman's 
 baptismal name at Basingstoke, in the following enumera- 
 tion : " At Basingstoake, Anne Cross or Robert White, 
 at the Bell ; Avis Yate or Anthony Spittle, at the 
 Maidenhead ; Thomasin Barrell or Captaine Marlow, at 
 the George." 
 
 It is curious, at all events, to find the name of H. W.'s 
 heroine. Avis, an unusual name, borne by the hostess of 
 an inn at a busy place such as the poem describes, and 
 in the county where the scene is laid. But next I can 
 show an even more curious coincidence. The surname 
 
 199 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS A SUCCESSFUL POET 
 
 of the Basingstoke hostess is Yate : it should have been 
 her maiden surname, assuming that the man with whom 
 she is joined in the licence were her husband. What 
 I shall next show is that there were persons of the 
 name of Yate living, in 1594, in that very manor of 
 Merdon to which we have traced Avisa before her 
 marriage, and that the said Mr. and Mrs. Yate, of Pitt 
 Farm, were in correspondence with the household of 
 Lady Southampton (his lordship's mother) at South- 
 ampton House, In Holborn, London. There are often 
 strange coincidences, and I do not risk the case upon 
 minute probabilities ; but it may be worth while giving 
 the facts which connect these Merdon people with the 
 Southampton household. 
 
 They are found in the State Papers, in the com- 
 munications made to Lord Keeper Puckering by a 
 certain informer named Beard, concerning the move- 
 ments of Catholics who were under suspicion of being 
 parties to the Lopez plot against the Queen in 1594. 
 It does not appear that the two priests referred to were 
 really implicated in the plot or had any evil designs. 
 The Countess of Southampton, whose name comes into 
 the correspondence, was a Catholic, but she was none 
 the less esteemed by Queen Elizabeth, and appears to 
 have been an estimable lady in every way (I have a 
 reason for suspecting that she was Shakespeare's original 
 for the delightful old Countess of Rousillon in ' All's 
 Well that Ends Well '). Two Jesuits had landed in 
 Cornwall, and had been brought on their way as far as 
 Hampshire, where they were harboured for some time 
 by Mr. and Mrs. Yate at Pitt Farm, in Hampshire. 
 On 1 6th March the information from Beard is, that 
 " the two Jesuits lately with Mrs. Yates have gone to 
 Mr. Wells at Brombridge " — an ancient Catholic house 
 near Otterbourne, a few miles to the east of Merdon. 
 It was the Yates who brought the Jesuits to London. 
 Yate's wife and Tregion's wife and two daughters were 
 present at the Mass held at Cornwallis' house of Fisher's 
 
NOSCITUR A SOCIIS 
 
 Folly [Bishopsgate] by Jones, alias Norton, and Butler. 
 Butler was sometime chamber-fellow with Mr. Harring- 
 ton, who serves Lady Southampton. Beard thinks that 
 since he has come over he is still harboured by him. 
 They lived about eight years since in Southampton 
 House. In the information dated i6th March, while 
 they were still in Hampshire, it is stated that "they 
 will return before Easter to London, where they 
 always abide about Chancery Lane and Southampton 
 House." 
 
 " Pitt Farm, in Hampshire," is one of the farms on 
 the manor of Merdon, and gives its name to the hamlet 
 of Pitt. The farm stands on the left-hand side of the 
 high-road, about two miles out from Winchester, at the 
 point where it turns southwards to Hursley village, a 
 branch road being continued straight on to Merdon 
 Castle. The extensive sheep-down which encloses the 
 manor of Merdon on the north and west is called by 
 the same name as the farm and hamlet — Pitt Down ; 
 so that Pitt Farm was probably the chief sheep-farm. 
 It was occupied in 1594 by Mr. and Mrs. Yale, who 
 had been engaged to receive two Jesuit priests lately 
 landed in Cornwall, and previously known as frequenters 
 of Southampton House in London. It appears from 
 the same correspondence that the manor of Merdon had 
 other Catholic tenants, perhaps because it had been so 
 long under the Bishops of Winchester. What more 
 likely than that the Countess of Southampton, or her 
 steward in Holborn, should be acquainted with this 
 recusant locality, not far from Southampton, and should 
 have directed the Jesuits to a particular house in it.? 
 It almost implies some close relation between the Yates 
 of Pitt Farm and the Southampton household, that the 
 former should have harboured recusant priests, whom 
 they brought to London and handed over to Lady 
 Southampton's people in Holborn. Thus we should 
 have a special reason, besides the common fame of 
 " beauty's wonder " in his neighbourhood, why the young 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS A SUCCESSFUL POET 
 
 Lord Southampton should have known the maid of the 
 inn or farm at Merdon — Avisa, who became the object 
 of the " nobleman's " first boyish love (" Thou art the 
 first I ever tried"). Whether she was Avis Yate of 
 the Basingstoke inn in Taylor's time I do not feel sure, 
 although the coincidences of both the name Avis and 
 the surname Yate in the hostess of an inn in Hampshire 
 are striking enough. Even in 1636 she would have 
 been little more than sixty. While the baptismal name 
 Avis is found at Basingstoke in Taylor's list, the sur- 
 name Bird is found at Winchester, Ann Bird being the 
 licence-holder at one of the four inns of the town, 
 which may or may not have been the George, as the 
 respective signs are not given. Whether Basingstoke or 
 Winchester were the town meant in the poem, Samuel 
 Daniel (the S. D. of the Latin verses upon Avisa) would 
 have heard of this famous hostess, and probably seen 
 her in his journeys to and from Wilton, where he was 
 tutor to the young Lord Herbert. 
 
 These minute probabilities apart, there are sufficient 
 grounds for the hypothesis that H. W. is Henry 
 Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, then at the age of 
 twenty-one, and already the object of many compli- 
 ments upon his wit and distinguished qualities. The 
 initials are, of course, those of Henry Willobie also ; 
 but the latter is practically confessed to be a fiction ; 
 and at the place where the initials W. S. come in, the 
 full name of Henry Willobie is dropped, or is used 
 only in the playful Italian form of Henrico Willobegio, 
 so that the initials H. W. are as it were set free for 
 their real import as soon as the author's direct relations 
 with W. S. begin. Moreover, this change of plan is the 
 subject of a special sentence in the preface : " From the 
 44th Canto to the end of the book it seems that, in 
 this last example [of Avisa's suitors], the author names 
 himself, and so describeth his own love : who that was 
 I know not, and I will not be curious." No one seems 
 to doubt the identity of W. S., and as we are told in the 
 
NOSCITUR A SOCIIS 
 
 preface to the second edition that the readers of the book 
 had been busy " framing names to letters," it is hardly 
 doubtful that they had framed Lord Southampton's 
 name to the letters H. W. 
 
 The identity of the French suitor, Dudum Beatus, 
 with Barnabe Barnes, and of the German, Didymus 
 Harco, with Gabriel Harvey, could be made probable 
 by various things, involving, however, much citation 
 and needing too much space.^ It is at once easier and 
 more useful to prove that a certain Rogero, who is 
 introduced into the supplementary canto of the second 
 edition, was Southampton's closest friend. Lord Rudand. 
 He is made arbiter in a supposed rivalry between Avisa 
 and certain angry dames, and is thus described : 
 
 A noble prince in Rosie born, 
 Rogero hight, — 
 
 with the marginal remark, " Rogero, a nobleman of 
 Greece, not far from Helicon." The meaning of "in 
 Rosie born " appears to be that Roger Manners was 
 known as Lord Roos or Ros from his birth until he 
 succeeded to the earldom of Rutland in his twelfth year. 
 The meaning of " not far from Helicon " is not clear 
 at once, inasmuch as Helicon is Wilton, and the seat of 
 
 ' One of the proofs is that D. B. signs himself "Fortuna ferenda,'' 
 which is Pistol's favourite maxim. Another is the following resemblance 
 between D. B. and Don Adriano de Armado (who is the same as Pistol). 
 D. B. justifies his attempts to seduce Avisa by Biblical precedents : 
 
 The Lord did love King David well 
 Although he had more wives than one. 
 King Soloman that did excel 
 For "wealth and wit. . . . 
 
 Armado. Yet was Samson so tempted, and he had an excellent strength ; yet 
 was Solomon so seduced, and he had a very good wit. 
 
 It was a standing jest against Barnes that the piety of his second volume 
 of verse, the Centurie of Spiritual Sonnets, assorted ill with his known 
 character ; as Nash said, it was " like the godly ballad of John Careless, or 
 the tune of Greensleeves moralised," the latter being turned round by 
 Shakespeare to " the Hundredth Psalm sung to the tune of Greensleeves." 
 The name of Dudum Beatus in Aiiisa seems to point to Barnes's profession 
 that he had been converted, or that he had " found peace," at some point 
 of time between his first volume of verse and his second. 
 
 203 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS A SUCCESSFUL POET 
 
 Lord Rutland was Belvoir in the Midlands ; but his 
 lordship shortly after married the daughter of Sir Philip 
 Sidney, who had made Wilton the English Helicon, and 
 it may have been known to his friend that he was not 
 far from that alliance at the time when he was exercising 
 his wit upon Rogero. It may mean also that Rogero, 
 a noble Greek, was not far from being a poet, which is 
 consistent with what is known of Lord Rutland's 
 cultivated taste. 
 
 If Lord Southampton published Avisa anonymously, 
 and lived to see four more editions of it without putting 
 his name to it, we may be sure that he was desirous 
 only of being a poet under the rose. If I am not too 
 prolix, I should like to strengthen that probability by 
 another instance. In Francis Davison's Poetical 
 Rapsodie (1602) there is the following "Inscription for 
 the Statue of Dido " : 
 
 O most unhappy Dido, 
 
 Unhappy wife and more unhappy widow ! 
 
 Unhappy in thy Mate, 
 
 And in thy Lover more unfortunate. 
 
 By treason the one was reft thee ; 
 
 By treason the other left thee. 
 
 That left thee means to fly with ; 
 
 This left thee means to die with. 
 
 The former being dead. 
 
 From Brother's sword thou fliest. 
 
 The latter being fled. 
 
 On Lover's sword thou diest. 
 
 Piu meritare, che conseguire. 
 
 This poem comes last in the section of the volume in 
 which are included " sonnets, odes, elegies, madrigals, 
 and epigrams by Francis Davison and Walter Davison, 
 brethren." But it is signed with an Italian motto, and 
 is the only poem in the whole volume that is signed in 
 that way. On the other hand, many of the later 
 cantos of Avisa are signed with similar mottoes 
 (proverbs or maxims) in Italian, a language in which 
 Lord Southampton had become proficient, as we know 
 
 204 
 
'WIDOW DIDO' 
 
 from his tutor, John Florio. I suspect that the 
 inscription for the " statue " of Dido was his, for the 
 following reasons : — 
 
 It will be observed that the first couplet contains 
 the quaint conceit of Dido as a widow, and the forced 
 rhyme of Dido to widow, which reminds one of 
 Mercutio's verbal wit, " Dido a dowdy." This was 
 a rhyme that was sure to have gone the round of the 
 tavern wits, and it is a probable explanation (no other 
 has ever been offered) of the joke about widow Dido 
 against Antonio in ' The Tempest.' The talk having 
 arisen about the recent marriage of Claribel at Tunis 
 (ancient Carthage), Adrian remarks that " Tunis was 
 never graced before with such a paragon to their 
 queen " ; whereupon Gonzalo, with crafty intent, 
 adds : " Not since widow Dido's time," and at once 
 Antonio shows irritation : 
 
 Antonio. Widow ! A pox o' that ! How came that " widow " 
 in ? widow Dido ! 
 
 Sebastian. What if he had said " widower ^neas " too ? Good 
 Lord, how you take it ! 
 
 A little later Antonio is again rallied upon widow 
 Dido, and answers, " O widow Dido ! ay, widow 
 Dido," as if he were reaffirming and justifying the 
 phrase. I believe that he was conscious also of the 
 rhyme between " Dido " and " widow " as his own. 
 It is not altogether impossible to construct the circum- 
 stances in which Southampton wrote the inscription for 
 the statue of Dido. 
 
 In Henslowe's Diary he enters among the theatrical 
 properties of the Lord Admiral's men, at the date of 
 March 1599, not only Dido's robe but also her tomb 
 (" I tome of Dido"). The tomb could not possibly 
 have been required for Marlowe's Tragedy of Dido 
 (1594), as the queen perishes by throwing herself into 
 the flames of a heap of wood, of which her attendants 
 had made a fire ; and the curtain falls immediately, upon 
 the death of Dido's sister Anna and of her lover, 
 
 205 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS A SUCCESSFUL POET 
 
 larbas, by their own hands. But it appears from 
 Henslowe's day-book that there was another play, Dido 
 and Mneas, performed by the Lord Admiral's men on 
 the 8th of January 1598. On the third of that month 
 he had "layd owte xxixs. for copper lace for the littell 
 boye, for a valle (? veil) for the boye, ageanste the 
 playe of Dido and Eneus " — that is to say, the play 
 was in preparation. The occasion of its first production 
 by the Lord Admiral's men was clearly a special one — 
 at night and on a private stage : " Lent [for one] unto 
 the company, when they fyrst played Dido at nyght, the 
 some of thirty shillynges, w""" wasse the 8 of Jenewary, 
 1597, I sayexxxs" — ^meaning 8th January 15^^. The 
 public performances in the theatres were in the day- 
 time ; a performance at night would have been in some 
 nobleman's mansion, and the special payment to the 
 company points to the same thing. (Collier, who edited 
 the Diary, is driven to the interpretation that Henslowe 
 gave the actors thirty shillings to regale themselves with 
 at a tavern on the night of the 8 th of January, after 
 they had played Dido in the daytime ; but the words 
 "when they first played Dido at night" are capable of 
 only one meaning.) This, then, was probably the play 
 for which the tomb of Dido was required ; whether it 
 had carried the action of the tragedy beyond the self- 
 immolation of the queen or not, it had probably ended 
 with an epilogue and the exhibition of her tomb, which 
 may have had the above inscription upon it, just as the 
 same Poetical Rapsodie shows elsewhere the diagram 
 of ' An Altar and Sacrifice to Disdain,' with verses 
 printed in a formal way as if inscribed upon it. 
 
 Nothing more is heard of this play of Dido and 
 Mneas after its first production at night on the 8 th of 
 January. My conjecture is that it was got up by Lord 
 Southampton, who employed Henslowe to stage it for 
 him at Southampton House ; and that is made probable 
 by the following from a letter written to Sir Robert 
 Sidney on the 30th of January 1598: "My Lord 
 
 206 
 
'DIDO AND tENEAS' 
 
 Compton, my Lord Cobham, Sir Walter Rawley, my 
 Lord Southampton, doe severally feast Mr. Secretary 
 [Cecil] before he depart [for Paris] and have Plaies 
 and Banquets." These plays and banquets must 
 have extended over some short time during Cecil's 
 preparations for his Embassy ; it became known on 
 14th January that "my Lord Southampton goes with 
 Mr. Secretary to France " ; and his entertainment to 
 Cecil may well have been given before that date, say on^ 
 the 8 th, the play being Dido and Mneas, which, if not 
 all written by his lordship, yet had an Epilogue by him, 
 in the form of an epitaph for Dido's tomb. (See the 
 note on " Eneas' Tale to Dido " in Chapter XIL) 
 
 207 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR, 1 594-1597 
 
 The picture given us in Willobie his Avisa of the 
 author, H. W., conferring with his friend and adviser 
 W. S., is a very natural one if it be understood of Lord 
 Southampton and Shakespeare ; it is quite in keeping 
 with the warm terms of the dedication of ' Lucrece ' : 
 " The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end. 
 . . . What I have done is yours, what I have to do is 
 yours ; being part in all I have, devoted yours." 
 fVhat I have to do is yours : — if this had been taken 
 literally, and enforced without " remorse and nature " 
 when the critical moment came, it would be not unlike 
 the motive for supplanting Prospero in the political 
 allegory. What he had to do in the immediate future 
 was to devote his imaginative powers to dramatic 
 composition ; and I have now to show that he con- 
 ceived this project in collaboration with his patron. 
 Southampton's authorship of Avisa, which I have been 
 at some pains to prove, is evidence not only of his 
 ability to write clever and witty verse, but also of his 
 literary ambition. Avisa s prefaces contain hints of 
 other pretty conceits from the same pen ; and the poem 
 ends with a qualified promise : 
 
 If this be liked, then can I say 
 Ye may see more another day. 
 
 It was indeed remarkably successful, perhaps just 
 because it was a^^a d" esprit. It is reasonable to suppose 
 
 zo8 
 
COLLABORATION 
 
 that his first practice with the pen had given him a 
 taste for more work, perhaps in a different line ; and what 
 more natural, after working with Shakespeare, than that 
 he should think of the poetic drama as a proper object 
 for them both ? Shakespeare's indifference to, or disdain 
 for, the vilia vulgi had kept him hitherto from doing 
 anything for the stage beyond dressing other men's 
 plays (all the confident statements assigning early dates 
 to ' Love's Labour's Lost ' and ' The Two Gentlemen of 
 Verona ' are only guesses, and are absolutely baseless). 
 His friendship with Southampton corresponds in time, 
 at least, with a new prospect for his ambition, in which 
 the end was dramatic work as truly of Castalian inspira- 
 tion as the poesy too delicate for the stage. Let us 
 suppose him contemplating Marlowe's Jew of Malta, 
 which, we can still see from Henslowe's accounts, was a play 
 that drew good houses and had a long run. Why not 
 aim at an equal success with something in a different 
 vein ? This may not have been exactly the way that 
 ' The Merchant of Venice ' came to be written, but at 
 all events that seems to have been the play, under the 
 name of ' The Venetian Comedy,' which was produced 
 at Henslowe's theatre in the autumn of 1594 (about the 
 same time that Avisa was published), and proved so 
 successful that the new Jew, Shylock, shortly drove 
 Marlowe's Jew into the background, the process of 
 supplanting being traceable clearly by the entries in the 
 manager's day-book. The plays which followed, as I 
 interpret the order, were : ' The Comedy of Errors ' ; 
 an early draft of ' Henry V.,' with Pistol and Fluellen 
 prominent in it ; ' Edward III.' ; ' Richard II.' ; 
 ' Romeo and Juliet ' ; and ' A Midsummer Night's 
 Dream' — filling the years from 1594 to 1597. (To the 
 same period belongs 'Richard III.,' but that appears 
 rather to be in the class of old plays which Shakespeare 
 rewrote thoroughly.) He must have had, or he did 
 have, some help or collaboration (perhaps more than he 
 wanted) in all these ; and I shall take first, out of its 
 
 209 P 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 order, the history of ' Edward IIL,' which was anony- 
 mous like all the others printed before 1598, and was 
 never claimed by Shakespeare, although it is admitted 
 by many good judges, including Tennyson, to contain 
 his undoubted work. 
 
 ' King Edward the Third ' 
 
 This play, first printed in 1596, is occupied mainly 
 with Edward III.'s victories in France, which are 
 crowded together and displaced from their order, so that 
 Poitiers (1356) comes before Calais (1347) ; but it 
 contains also, in the two first Acts, a love-episode 
 between the king and the Countess of Salisbury (from 
 Painter's Palace of Pleasure), which takes place at 
 Roxborough Castle, on the Scottish border. It is only 
 in the two first Acts that Shakespeare's hand has been 
 clearly traced ; it is obvious to every reader that the 
 three last Acts are almost uniformly commonplace and 
 inferior, the one exception being in the fourth scene of 
 Act IV. (Black Prince) ; and in my opinion these 
 battle-pieces are the work of Barnabe Barnes, and in 
 the same style as ' i Henry VI.' But the two first 
 Acts are by no means homogeneous. The first scene, 
 at the Court in London, is in the same routine manner 
 as the opening scene of ' Henry V.' (in the quarto, not 
 the folio), and deals with the same question as there, 
 but much more briefly, namely, the English heritable 
 succession to the French Crown. There is one notable 
 speech in it, by the king, beginning, 
 
 See how occasion laughs me in the face ! 
 
 Shakespeare in this instance follows his old rule of picking 
 out the best situations for himself. His next interposi- 
 tion is at the close of the first scene at Roxborough 
 Castle, where he ends the first interview between the 
 king and the countess by two speeches of lively rhyme. 
 In the Second Act he undertakes a good deal more ; but 
 
'EDWARD III.' 
 
 even there, in the midst of the love-episode, there is 
 another pen at work from time to time, which I believe 
 to have been Southampton's. The style of these non- 
 Shakespearian passages is radically different from the 
 commonplace verbiage in which the battles and sieges 
 of the three last Acts are displayed : it is a peculiar 
 style, with abundance of ideas, but stiff in the move- 
 ment, passionless, and coldly sententious. It will be 
 necessary, for an ulterior object, to give samples of it. 
 The speeches of Warwick, the father of the lady whom 
 the king loves, are all in this manner : 
 
 The mighty King of England dotes on thee : 
 
 He that hath power to take away thy life 
 
 Hath power to take thine honour ; then consent 
 
 To pawn thine honour, rather than thy life : 
 
 Honour is often lost and got again : 
 
 But life, once gone, hath no recovery. 
 
 The sun, that withers hay, doth nourish grass : 
 
 The king that would distain thee will advance thee. 
 
 The poets write that great Achilles' spear 
 
 Could heal the wounds it made : the moral is — 
 
 What mighty men misdo, they can amend, etc. 
 
 Even the answer of the countess, his daughter, is in 
 the same coldly argumentative style, and so is the next 
 speech of Warwick : 
 
 The freshest summer's day doth soonest taint 
 The loathed carrion that it seems to kiss : 
 Deep are the blows made with a mighty axe : 
 That sin doth ten times aggravate itself. 
 That is committed in a holy place : 
 An evil deed done by authority 
 Is sin and subornation : deck an ape 
 In tissue, and the beauty of the robe 
 Adds but the greater scorn unto the beast. 
 A spacious field of reasons could I urge 
 Between his glory, daughter, and thy shame : 
 That poison shows worst in a golden cup : 
 Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash : 
 Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds, etc. 
 
 Surely Shakespeare was incapable, at any time since 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 he began to make verses, of such a sorites of copy-book 
 maxims, which are all measured to the length of a line, 
 which never glide gracefully the one into the other, 
 which contain thought without fancy, argument without 
 one gleam of feeling. It is in the speech last quoted 
 that we find the famous line — 
 
 Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds — 
 
 famous because it reappears in Shakespeare's 94th 
 Sonnet. The germ of this metaphor of the lilies and 
 the weeds is found in the loth Canto of WilloHe his 
 Avisa, where the young nobleman, angry at being 
 repelled by the low-born maid of the inn, compares 
 himself to a lily and her to a weed : 
 
 Unhappy lily loves a weed, 
 
 That gives no scent, that yields no glee. 
 
 The 94th Sonnet is one of two in the whole series of 
 154 (the other being the 121st) in which some third 
 party, neither Shakespeare nor the person habitually 
 addressed, is referred to in the plural number as " they " : 
 
 They that have power to hurt and will do none, 
 That do not do the thing they most do show. 
 Who, moving others, are themselves as stone. 
 Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow. 
 
 That is also the character of Dumaine, in ' Love's 
 Labour's Lost ' ; and both Dumaine and " they " of 
 S. 94 are Lord Southampton. We get the clue to his 
 identity through the reference to "infection" in the 
 nth line : 
 
 The summer's flower is to the summer sweet. 
 Though to itself it only live and die : 
 But if that flower with base infection meet. 
 The basest weed outbraves his dignity. 
 
 For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds ; 
 
 Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. 
 
 The flower which meets with base infection carries us 
 back to Sonnets 67 and 68 : 
 
 212 
 
'EDWARD III.' 
 
 Ah ! wherefore with infection should he live ? 
 
 The sonnet is an affectionate appeal to Lord Herbert 
 in the third person. The indirect address to him runs 
 on into the next ,sonnet, where we come to the contrast 
 of " infection," the simile of the untainted flower living 
 and dying to itself, which, in the second line of the 
 following, is the same figure of speech as in the loth 
 line of S. 94 just given : 
 
 Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn, 
 When beauty lived and died as flowers do now. 
 Before these bastard signs of fair were born. 
 Or durst inhabit on a living brow : 
 Before the golden tresses of the dead. 
 The right of sepulchres, were shorn away. 
 To live a second life on second head. 
 
 This is a very bold and unmistakable hit at Lord 
 Southampton. Looking at his long " browny " curls in 
 one or more of his portraits as a young man, some have 
 doubted (for example, the late Mr. S. Butler, Shake- 
 speare's Sonnets, 1899, p. 54) whether they were not 
 a wig ; but the fact is actually on record. Among 
 other Court news written to Sir Robert Sidney, 
 Governor of Flushing, by his secretary at home, is an 
 account of a fracas in the Court between Southampton 
 and Ambrose Willoughby, one of the esquires of the 
 body, on a night in January 1598, in which the latter 
 laid hands upon the young lord, " and pulled off some 
 of the Earl's locks." 
 
 At the date of this first reference, in Sonnets 67 and 
 68, to the summer flower being infected by a tainted 
 companion, which would be early in 1599, Shake- 
 speare had merely the interest of affection in warning 
 Lord Herbert against Southampton, who had just 
 returned from a prolonged and reckless dissipation in 
 Paris. But at the date of Sonnet 94 he had a reason 
 more personal to himself ; for he had lately discovered 
 that it was through the machinations of his quondam 
 patron that Lord Herbert had been gained over to 
 
 213 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 oppose his candidature for the vacant office of Poet 
 Laureate. He expresses his sense of the situation with 
 his unfailing wit, by quoting Southampton's own line 
 about the festering liUes in ' Edward III.,' convicting 
 him by a moral tag out of his own mouth. It is clear 
 that the sonnet was constructed so as to end with the 
 quotation of the old line, from the fact that the pen- 
 ultimate line is a forced idiom for the sake of getting 
 in " deeds " to rhyme with " weeds." 
 
 Shakespeare's share in ' Edward III. ' had been rela- 
 tively so small in bulk (although it is the redeeming 
 part of the play) that he did not claim the authorship, 
 and of course he did not claim part authorship. It is 
 probable that the play was Lord Southampton's own 
 design, and that Barnes had been left, after the Second 
 Act, to finish it as a mere " drum-and-trumpet thing," 
 like ' I Henry VI.' In the original quarto of 1596 
 (copy in the British Museum) there is a change actually 
 in the typography at the beginning of Act III., the 
 heading of that and following scenes being in bold type, 
 as if so marked upon a new MS. This is the only play 
 of what I shall call the collaboration-period, besides the 
 opening of ' Henry V.,' which bears quite obvious 
 traces of a third hand, that of Barnabe Barnes, whom 
 I suppose (Chapter VI.) to have been Shakespeare's 
 assistant in extracting plots from Holinshed, both his- 
 torical and legendary, as late as ' Cymbeline ' and 
 ' Macbeth.' ' 
 
 1 Barnes is Pistol ; and in ' The Merry Wives of Windsor ' Pistol is 
 accused by Slender of having picked his purse of " seven groats in mill- 
 sixpences and two Edward shovel-boards, that cost me two shillings and 
 two pence a-piece of Yead Miller, by these gloves." Pistol denies the 
 charge : 
 
 Sir John and master mine, 
 I combat challenge or this latten bilbo. 
 Word of denial in thy labras here ! 
 Word of denial : froth and scum, thou liest. 
 
 Abraham Slender is Francis Thynne, who, with John Stow and Abraham 
 Fleming, was employed under Hoker, of Exeter, in editing the new edition 
 of Holinshed's Chronicles, from which all the historical plots were taken. 
 The seven groats in mill-sixpences (coins with milled edges used as counters) 
 
 214 
 
A COMEDY AT GRAY'S INN 
 
 ' The Comedy of Errors ' 
 
 The circumstances of the production of ' The Comedy 
 of Errors ' suit the hypothesis of Southampton's col- 
 laboration. It was produced on the night of 28th 
 December 1594, in the Hall of Gray's Inn. Southamp- 
 ton had been a member of the Inn since 1589, and his 
 house was in Holborn exactly opposite its gateway (the 
 site being still marked by the name of Southampton 
 Buildings). Let us say that he had undertaken to get 
 up a play for the Christmas festivities ; Shakespeare 
 would help him in it, as well as Barnes ; perhaps also 
 John Florio would be useful from his acquaintance with 
 the theme of the ' Errors ' as a favourite in Italian and 
 Spanish comedies. The ' Comedy of Errors ' is peculiar 
 among all the adaptations of Plautus as combining the 
 action of two plays, the Menaechmi and the Amphitryon ; 
 besides the confusion between the two merchants, the 
 twin-brothers Antipholus (which is from the plot of the 
 Menaechmi), there is the confusion between their respec- 
 tive servants, the twin-brothers Dromio (which is from 
 the plot of the Amphitryon'). As regards the two 
 
 were the seven editions to date of four historical plays — two of ' Richard 
 II.,' two of ' Richard III.,' two of ' i Henry IV.,' and another which may 
 have been either ' z Henry IV. ' or the anonymous ' Henry V.' The two 
 Edward shovel-boards (broad shillings of. Edward VI. used in the game 
 of shovel - board) were the two editions of 'Edward HI.'; but Yead 
 Miller is a mystery. FalstafFsees his ancient through the accusation : " You 
 hear all these matters denied, gentlemen ; you hear it." Nym had been 
 taxed with the theft after Pistol denied it, and, in the folio tex^ Bardolf also 
 is made to answer the charge. I have not found any good clue to their 
 identities, although both must have been drawn from life. I suspect Nym 
 to be Marston, and mine host of the Garter to be Ben Jonson. Dr. Caius 
 is the name of a well-known physician not long dead. I have given an 
 explanation of Shakespeare's exhibition of him as a Frenchman in an 
 article on "Falstaff's Deathbed" in Blackijuood's Magazine, March 1889. 
 Dr. Johnson says : " This comedy is remarkable for the variety and number 
 of the personages, who exhibit more characters appropriated and dis- 
 criminated than perhaps can be found in any other play." It is most 
 instructive to find that the other play on which he makes a similar remark 
 is ' Troilus and Cressida ' : " He has diversified his characters with great 
 variety, and preserved them with exactness." I shall show in Chapter XII. 
 that the latter play is full of real persons, poets and statesmen. 
 
 215 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 Dromios, it was not absolutely necessary that Shake- 
 speare should have read Plautus at all, whether in Latin 
 or in a translation ; for the Amphitryon had been made 
 into an Interlude for children's acting some years before. 
 It is known that there was a History of Error acted 
 by the children of Paul's in 1577; and there is extant 
 a single copy of A new Enterlued for Chyldren to 
 play, named Jacke Jugekr, printed without date by 
 Wylliam Copland in Lothbury, (It has been reprinted 
 by Grosart, in a volume of Elizabethan Miscellanies, 
 but without comment upon its Latin source, or its 
 relation to ' The Comedy of Errors.') " The ground 
 thereof" is stated to be " out of Plautus' first comedie," 
 that is to say, Amphitryon, the first in alphabetical order 
 of the titles. The plot is reduced to the simplicity of 
 an interlude for children to play, and adapted to life in 
 London, The chief parts are those of Jack Juggler 
 and Jenkin Careaway, two servants who correspond 
 closely with the two Dromios in Shakespeare's ' Errors.' 
 Thus Jack says : 
 
 My purpose is, 
 To make Jenkin believe, if I can. 
 That he is not himself but another man. 
 
 The fun in Amphitryon is made by the deity Mercury 
 assuming the likeness of the servant Sosia; in the 
 English interlude Jack "makes up" to resemble 
 Jenkin ; in ' The Comedy of Errors ' the two Dromios 
 are twin-brothers with a very close natural resemblance. 
 Dromio of Syracuse finds himself by nature the same 
 double that Jack Juggler made himself by art : " Do 
 you know me, sir .'' Am I Dromio .'' am I your man ? 
 am I myself? " Not only does Shakespeare follow the 
 humours of this quaint interlude, especially in the scene 
 outside the street door in Act III. Scene i., but he falls 
 for the nonce into the same long jingling rhymes, with 
 a halt in the middle (as he does also in the mummery of 
 the Nine Worthies in the fifth Act of ' Love's Labour's 
 Lost '). 
 
 216 
 
'THE COMEDY OF ERRORS' 
 
 With such hints from the old English interlude 
 (probably the same as the History of Error spoken of 
 under the year 1S77)> ^^ ^^Y ^°^ ^^^^ ^^^'^ necessary 
 to go to the original of the Jmphitryon. But it is 
 probable that the author of Locrine (Barnes) knew the 
 original, from the fact that the rather heavy humour 
 between the famishing Humber and Strumbo, ending 
 with the latter's speech, " O alas, sir, you are deceived. 
 I am not Mercury, I am Strumbo," is based upon the 
 situation of Sosia in the Latin play. There is also 
 the curious correspondence (already pointed out by 
 Wiscllcenus, In Shakespeare Jahrbilcher, xlv. 1879) 
 between the end of ' Pericles ' (by Barnes) and the end 
 of ' The Comedy of Errors ' : the supposed dead wife 
 of Pericles is discovered in the priestess of the temple 
 of Diana at Ephesus, and the supposed lost wife of 
 ^geon is found in the abbess of a convent in the same 
 city. The whole of the ' Errors ' relating to the two 
 merchants Antipholus are taken very closely from the 
 text of the Menaechmi (of which the first English 
 translation, by W. W., was not published until the 
 year after, 1595, although it is said to have been In 
 existence in MS. some time before). In this instance 
 it is perhaps hopeless to allocate their respective shares 
 to the collaborators, as I believe one can do In ' Edward 
 III.' and In some of the plays to be taken next. 
 Shakespeare claimed the work as his when he gave 
 Meres a list of his plays in the autumn of 1598 ; and, 
 as It had never been printed In quarto, he was free to 
 rewrite it, or to remove all traces of another pen which 
 he may not have been satisfied with. But In using 
 Latin or Italian sources, it is nearly certain that he had 
 help ; and in managing the humorous confusions of 
 the action — more intricate than Plautus had attempted 
 in a single play — two heads would have been better 
 than one. 
 
 217 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 'The Merchant of Venice' 
 
 Although it is probable that this, the most popular 
 of the Comedies, was put on the stage in the autumn 
 of 1594, it is first heard of under its ultimate name 
 through the entry of it for copyright on 22nd July 1598, 
 by James Roberts, a printer whom Shakespeare em- 
 ployed. The copyright was withheld by the wardens 
 until the Lord Chamberlain's licence had been got. 
 Two years after, 1600, the first edition was printed by 
 Roberts without a publisher's name ; and on 28 th 
 October of that year, Thomas Hayes took out copy- 
 right for the book, " with the consent of Mr. Roberts," 
 and issued an edition, also dated 1600, which bears 
 that it was printed for him by Roberts. Here we have 
 the same singular phenomenon as in the publication 
 the same year (and same month of the year) of ' A 
 Midsummer Night's Dream,' namely, two concurrent 
 editions ; but in the latter case neither issue had a 
 publisher's name, while only one of them was printed 
 by Roberts. The text of ' The Merchant of Venice ' 
 in 1 600 is so polished that good judges (the late W. 
 G. Clark and Dr. Aldis Wright) believe it to have been 
 " in great part rewritten between the time of its first 
 production in 1594 and its publication in 1600." There 
 are now so few inequalities in it that it is impossible to 
 trace another hand. If anywhere, we may look for 
 persisting traces of the collaborator in the passages 
 relating to Portia's numerous suitors. But we may be 
 sure that it was Shakespeare who wrote, or rewrote, 
 the monologue of Bassanio ; for it illustrates the theme 
 of golden illusions by a reference to those who wear 
 false locks, which is the same theme as in Sonnet 68, 
 and would have been inspired by the recollection of 
 the quondam patron and collaborator : 
 
 Look on beauty. 
 And you shall see 'tis purchased by the weight ; 
 Which therein works a miracle in nature, 
 
 218 
 
' THE MERCHANT OF VENICE ' 
 
 Making them lightest that wear most of it : 
 
 So are those crisped snaky locks 
 
 Which make such wanton gambles with the wind 
 
 Upon supposed fairness, often known 
 
 To be the dower of a second head, 
 
 The skull that bred them in the sepulchre. 
 
 Collaboration must be asserted for this comedy, not 
 because of any marked inequality in the workmanship 
 (which indeed would have been got rid of in the 
 assumed rewriting previous to 1600), but because there 
 are materials in the plot, from an Italian source, which 
 Shakespeare would not have got access to without help. 
 The source of the Shylock part is accounted for easily, 
 inasmuch as the Jew and his bond was a favourite 
 subject of ballads at the time, such as Gernutus and The 
 Forfeiture. But in the former ballad the judge is the 
 ordinary judge of the court, and in the latter the 
 successful pleader against Shylock before the court is 
 the Jew's own daughter. Shakespeare may have wished 
 to vary that part of the old story for the sake of a more 
 complex plot. At all events the play introduces the 
 new part of Portia ; and it appears that the lady of that 
 name, occupying a house called Belmont on the shore 
 of the Adriatic near Venice, and in other respects 
 corresponding to the Portia of the play (together with 
 the story of the rings in Act V.), existed at that time 
 only in Italian, in a collection of tales called // Pecorone, 
 dating from Florence about the year 1378. There is 
 no escaping from the necessity for collaboration here : 
 some one must have told him of this foreign work, and 
 helped him to read it. The incident of the caskets was not 
 so completely beyond his own reach, as he might have 
 found it in a pure form in the collection called Gesta 
 Romanorum, supposing that he had Latin enough (which 
 is nearly certain) and patience to dig out what he 
 needed (which is not so certain). 
 
 Assuming that 'The Merchant of Venice,' as printed 
 in its polished form in 1600, was the same play as 
 
 219 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 'The Venetian Comedy,' which met with success at 
 Henslowe's theatre from the 25th of August 1594 
 until after the New Year (a good run, but not so 
 continuous nor so long as a revival of it would have 
 now), it was the first of the plays which Shakespeare 
 wrote in collaboration with his patron ; and I do not 
 doubt that he was indebted to the latter not a little 
 both for the inception of the design and the execution 
 of the plot. 
 
 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' 
 
 This famous comedy, and the not less celebrated 
 tragedy of ' Romeo and Juliet,' are two of the plays 
 in which Lord Southampton's direct and active partici- 
 pation may be looked for. The history of the printed 
 texts of both is peculiar. 'A Midsummer Night's 
 Dream' was printed first in 1600, in two editions 
 by different printers, but with an almost identical 
 text. One of these, which Shakespeare's execu- 
 tors used for the text of the play in the folio of 
 1623, was printed by James Roberts, who was some- 
 times employed by Shakespeare. Curiously enough, 
 this edition was not entered at Stationers' Hall, so 
 that the period of the year 1600 at which it issued 
 from the press cannot be guessed. But on the 8 th 
 October 1600 another printer, Thomas Fisher, entered 
 the play for copyright, and issued the same text with no 
 other changes than might be accounted for by better 
 composing from a printed copy. It is clear that these 
 were rival editions ; and, in my opinion, it is equally 
 . clear that the one printed by Roberts was the original 
 edition, and the other a replica of it. But it would be 
 an error to call either of them a piracy. Shakespeare's 
 printer could not pirate his work ; nor could another 
 printer have secured copyright for the book unless he 
 had some authority. • The authority of a collaborator 
 would suffice ; and in the hypothesis that the joint 
 
' MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM ' 
 
 authors of a work were no longer at amity, it is intel- 
 ligible that the publishing rights of each should have 
 been recognised separately. What is hardly to be 
 assumed is, that the business of Stationers' Hall should 
 have been carried on with such laxity as to allow piracy 
 under the author's eyes. The case which is always cited 
 as a precedent for the unauthorised publication of a 
 playwright's work is that of Heywood, who says that 
 he had heard of his English Traveller " coming acci- 
 dentally to the press," in 1631, and had thought fit to 
 father it with his name and a preface ; but he explains, 
 further, that he had no ambition to see his plays 
 printed, which shows his case to be exceptional, or at 
 all events not Shakespeare's case. The hypothesis that 
 explains best the strange history of the lifetime editions 
 of some of his plays is, that there were collateral rights, 
 which in some cases prevented his name from appear- 
 ing ('Romeo and Juliet' and 'Henry V.'), and in 
 other cases enabled a rival edition to be published 
 almost simultaneously (' Merchant of Venice ' and ' A 
 Midsummer Night's Dream '). 
 
 No trace of another pen than Shakespeare's in 
 ' A Midsummer Night's Dream ' can be discovered, 
 for the sufficient reason that it was highly polished, 
 and probably rewritten in parts, before it was sent 
 to the press in 1600. The assumption of rewriting, 
 which is allowed for ' The Merchant of Venice,' 
 is even more necessary for 'A Midsummer Night's 
 Dream.' Its harmonious blending of three or four 
 different and almost incongruous actions is among the 
 most wonderful feats of the author's genius. It must 
 have cost him time and thought to bring the text to 
 the perfection of the 1600 quarto. The evidence of 
 polishing is apparent in various passages, including 
 the famous compliment to the Virgin Queen. The 
 reference in the lines : 
 
 The thrice-three Muses mourning for the death 
 Of learning, late deceased in beggary. 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 is obviously to the death of Spenser (who died inops, 
 or in want, as Camden records), and to the title of 
 Spenser's own poem, "The Tears of the Muses," just 
 as the reference to his death in the Sonnets, 64-66, 
 contains a play upon the title of another poem by 
 Spenser, " The Ruins of Time." In ' A Midsummer 
 Night's Dream ' the supposed elegy is called " a satire 
 keen and critical " ; which indeed the three beautiful 
 sonnets are in a sense, especially the famous one 
 beginning " Tired with all these." Spenser died in 
 January 1599; and if these lines were written, as in 
 the hypothesis they must have been, after that date, 
 other passages were probably rewritten or polished in 
 the same interval. 
 
 While we are safe to infer that the author had been 
 at work upon this most characteristic and doubtless 
 favourite product of his genius down to the year 1599, 
 or perhaps to the year after (when it was printed), it is 
 not so easy to find the other limit, or its commencement. 
 Several things point to the year 1596 ; but there is a 
 long speech by Titania on the unnatural summer of 
 1594 (and on an equally inverted winter, which is made 
 to follow in the play, but appears really to have pre- 
 ceded, in 1593-94) ; and that has been held to mean 
 the writing of the play while the topic of the weather 
 was still fresh in mind. Old Churchyard, however, 
 gave a fillip to the subject a year later (1595) by 
 relating how a certain lord had remarked to him " that 
 the weather was too cold for poets " — a good hint to 
 enlarge upon. Supposing that we admit the weight of 
 evidence, that the plot could not have been settled until 
 1596, the lines on the cold summer of 1594 might have 
 been done earlier and independently, and worked into 
 the play, just as the Queen Mab passage in ' Romeo 
 and Juliet ' appears to have been worked in so that it 
 might not be lost. 
 
 Mr. Gerald Massey, who has elaborated the theory 
 that Lord Southampton was the young noble of Shake- 
 
'MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM' 
 
 speare's Sonnets, and that his future wife, Mistress Bess 
 Vernon, was the lady of the same, has developed in- 
 cidentally another theory, that * A Midsummer Night's 
 Dream ' was written to celebrate their prospective (and 
 long-delayed) wedding. There is much to be said for 
 the latter theory ; Demetrius, in the play, may well 
 have been Southampton himself, and Helena Mistress 
 Vernon ; while their crossed loves, and the rivalries of 
 Lysander and Hermia, may have corresponded with 
 some actual circumstances, of which no account remains.^ 
 Helena and Hermia appear to have been drawn from 
 life ; and the charming character of the former is 
 curiously like that of the other Helena, in ' All's Well 
 that Ends Well,' who was, in my opinion, certainly 
 meant for Mistress Vernon. In the hypothesis that 
 Lord Southampton's own love-affairs are in the play, it 
 would follow that Shakespeare could not have known 
 them at all intimately unless he had been in his lord- 
 ship's confidence. Also he writes of the Athenian lords 
 and ladies as if he had had himself a courtier's know- 
 ledge of the great world. Again, one may suspect that 
 the fairy-lore of the play must have been elaborated in 
 concert with some one who had a store of a certain kind 
 of fairy tales in his memory ; and in that connection I 
 would assign to the same collaborator the actual writing 
 of the long digression upon Queen Mab in ' Romeo and 
 Juliet.' In the conception of Duke Theseus we see 
 Shakespeare's proper genius, and of course also in all 
 
 1 That there were such possibilities may be exemplified by the following 
 letter of 5th July 1594, from Mary Hardinge to the Countess of Rutland, 
 suggesting the disposal of the hand of the Lady Bridget Manners to the 
 Lord Wharton : " I think if your ladyship ask Mr. Manners his advice, he 
 will speak straight of my Lord Bedford or my Lord Southampton, which 
 is exceeding unlikely. If they were in her choice, she saith she would 
 choose my Lord Wharton before them ; for they be so young and fantastical, 
 and would be so carried away, that if anything should come to your lady- 
 ship but good, being her only stay, she doubteth their carrying of them- 
 selves, seeing some experience of the like in this place. . . . Bridget is 
 weary of the Court. ... I think the nearest way were for her to feign the 
 measles, so she might have leave for a month to see your ladyship to air her." 
 — Cal. Belvoir MSS. 
 
 223 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 that related to the rehearsal and performance of the 
 play by the " rude mechanicals " of Athens. 
 
 But if we allow that Lord Southampton had not 
 contributed a single line of the text which was printed 
 in 1600, and even that his share in the construction of 
 the plot could only have been in discussing it with Shake- 
 speare, we should still have to admit the author's in- 
 debtedness for materials to him, or to some one with an 
 equally good library and artistic collection. I shall 
 give three illustrations of those necessary sources of the 
 playwright's ideas. 
 
 First, and most essential, is the " business " upon 
 which the whole action turns, namely, the property of a 
 juice or liquid expressed or distilled from some flower, 
 when dropped upon the eyelids, to excite love, or 
 contrariwise dislike, for the object that the eye first 
 opens upon. This fancy does not appear to have been 
 so widely spread in folk-lore that Shakespeare might 
 have known it without going to a special source. It 
 is not quite the same notion as in the couplet of ' Romeo 
 and Juliet,' of which there are indications in other writers 
 of the time : 
 
 Take thou some new infection in thine eye, 
 And the rank poison of the old will die. 
 
 The general idea of one poison expelling another was 
 familiar (as in Gardiner's Triall of Tobacco, 161 1), but 
 the action of the drug upon the eye in particular, with 
 rapid subjective effects in the passions and affections, is 
 more recondite. The nearest approach to Shakespeare's 
 use of the juice of a flower to excite love, or bring 
 back love, or displace love in the eye, has been recog- 
 nised by several critics in the Spanish story of Diana 
 by George de Montemayor, which has been used more 
 extensively for the plot of 'The Two Gentlemen of 
 Verona,' and used also for some things in 'Twelfth 
 Night.* The chief difference is that Montemayor does 
 not derive his liquor from a particular flower, nor 
 
 224 
 
' MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM ' 
 
 indeed explicitly from flowers at all ; but that need not 
 make any difficulty as to the source, for it is easy to see 
 that Shakespeare had a reason for bringing in the pansy, 
 or heart' s-ease, or love-in-idleness, as the flower from 
 which the magic juice was to be expressed. So far as 
 concerns the eff^ects, he may well have got the hint 
 from Diana, and no one appears to have found a better 
 origin. The shepherdess, Felismena, had lost the love 
 of Felix, who had transferred his affections to Celia 
 (this is Proteus deserting Julia for Silvia in ' The Two 
 Gentlemen of Verona ') ; Felismena goes in search of 
 him (as Julia goes after Proteus), and finds him on the 
 ground wounded and insensible. To her in her grief 
 there is seen approaching a fair nymph, over the cause- 
 way that led to the island, bearing a silver flask in one 
 hand and a golden in the other. From the silver bottle 
 Felix is sprinkled on the face with an odoriferous water, 
 so that he comes to his senses ; next he is made to 
 drink, doubtless from the golden bottle, and becomes 
 at once whole of his wounds. Felismena has been 
 bending over him during these rapid changes, in which 
 his usurping love for Celia has been expelled ; " and in 
 this sort he began to rekindle the old love that he bare 
 to Felismena, the which, he thought, was never more 
 zealous than now." This is near enough to the general 
 idea of ' A Midsummer Night's Dream,' although the 
 particular application in the play is varied and amplified. 
 The sentence just quoted is from the translation by 
 Bartholomew Young, which was not published until 
 November 1598, too late to have been used for the 
 plot either of ' A Midsummer Night's Dream ' or of 
 ' Two Gentlemen of Verona.' But it has been discovered 
 that there was another English translation which has 
 never been printed,^ " done out of Spanish by Thomas 
 Wilson, Esquire, in the year 1596, and dedicated to the 
 Earl of Southampton, who was then upon the Spanish 
 
 1 The title of it is entered among the MSS. of the Earl of Denbigh in 
 Bernard's Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum Angliae, 1697, vol. ii. p.'36. 
 
 225 Q 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR . 
 
 voyage with my lord of Essex " — that is to say, some 
 time between March and July 1596. It was most 
 probably from that MS. that Shakespeare got the plot 
 of ' The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' which we know 
 from Meres to have been written before Young's 
 translation appeared in November 1598 ; and it may 
 have been from the same manuscript, deposited in the 
 library of Southampton House, that he got the idea 
 of dropping a liquor upon the eyeUds to change the 
 passions of the mind as soon as the sleeping person 
 opened his or her eyes. There is, of course, no 
 medicinal reason why the liquor should have been derived 
 from the pansy. The exquisite conceit of the little 
 western flower, once milk-white, now purple with love's 
 wound, upon which the bolt of Cupid fell, has a strictly 
 private meaning to Shakespeare, and was probably meant 
 for only one other pair of eyes — Mistress Fitton's, the 
 maid-of-honour between whom and Shakespeare a 
 romantic attachment (originating in the opportunities 
 of Court theatricals) had sprung up some time previous 
 to 1598. The pansy was her floral emblem. The 
 shaft of Cupid missed the Queen, and fell upon the 
 little western flower, the symbol of her young maid-of- 
 honour from Cheshire. This allegory was probably one 
 of the embellishments which the author made upon 
 the play before he sent it to be printed. 
 
 Besides the MS. translation of Montemayor's Diana, 
 which he had access to in Lord Southampton's library 
 as early as the summer of 1596, it can be shown that 
 Shakespeare must have seen also an elegantly printed, and 
 perhaps privately distributed, souvenir of the festivi- 
 ties at the baptism of Prince Henry, the eldest son of 
 James VI., at Stirling on 30th August 1594. This 
 work was printed by King James's printer, with the 
 royal arms of Scotland on two of its pages, and does not 
 appear to have been published for sale : it is just the 
 kind of souvenir that would have been made and dis- 
 tributed afterwards to the numerous envoys and their 
 
 226 
 
« MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM ' 
 
 suites from other Protestant States who attended the 
 celebration, and to other privileged persons. The 
 interest of it for ' A Midsummer Night's Dream ' is that 
 it contains the original of the famous jest about " the 
 ladies being afeard of the lion "as he was personated 
 by Snug the joiner. At a certain part of the christen- 
 ing festivities at Stirling Castle, a chariot laden with 
 delicacies was drawn into the banqueting hall by a 
 blackamoor. 
 
 " This chariot," says the record, " should have been 
 drawn by a lion ; but because his presence might have 
 brought some fear to the nearest [' the ladies ' is the 
 reading used by Nimmo in his History of Stirlingshire], 
 or that the sight of the lights and torches might have 
 commoved his tameness, it was thought meet that the 
 Moor should supply that room." Another vehicle of 
 viands and delicacies for the banquet was a large full- 
 rigged galley, which was drawn into the hall with 
 Arion playing the harp as he sat upon the dolphin 
 forming the galley's figurehead, while three mermaids 
 ("above the middle as women, and under as fishes") 
 seemed to arise out of the " lively counterfeit sea of all 
 colours " upon which the galley rested. King James's 
 solicitude lest the ladies should be afraid of the lion 
 gave Shakespeare his cue for the solicitude of Snout the 
 tailor ; while the ingenious expedient of Bottom to allay 
 those fears had been suggested to him by another and 
 more famous pageant, always associated with the sources 
 of this comedy, that of Kenilworth, in July 1575, in 
 which Harry Goldingham played the part of Arion 
 upon the dolphin's back : " Finding his voice to be 
 very hoarse and unpleasant, when he came to perform 
 it, he tears off his disguise, and swears that he was none 
 of Arion, not he, but even honest Harry Goldingham " 
 — to Queen Elizabeth's great amusement. It was there- 
 fore agreed, upon the advice of Bottom, that he who 
 played the lion should make a similar declaration : he 
 told the ladies plainly that he was Snug the joiner, and 
 
 227 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 no lion. I take it that all this pleasantry was concocted 
 in the library of Southampton House. 
 
 A third instance of Shakespeare's indebtedness to 
 " documents " such as he could have found only in a 
 nobleman's house, was pointed out to me by the late 
 Dr. A. S. Murray. The scene of the play is ancient 
 Athens, for which famous city Shakespeare would have 
 had to " get up " a certain amount of local colour, even 
 if he did not use it to make a display of his learning. 
 Dr. Murray's happy discovery is, that when one looks 
 closely into the doggerel verses of Bottom, " The raging 
 rocks and shivering shocks," etc., one finds that they 
 contain the main ideas of the famous eastern pediment 
 of the Parthenon (lately under his care in the British 
 Museum), showing the birth of Pallas, the patron 
 goddess of Athens : 
 
 The raging rocks 
 And shivering shocks 
 Shall break the locks 
 
 Of prison gates. 
 And Phibbus' car 
 Shall shine from far, 
 And make or mar 
 
 The foolish fates. 
 
 Until some two or three hundred years ago what is 
 now a great gap in the centre of the eastern pediment 
 was filled with a mass of marble representing a con- 
 vulsion of nature (the raging rocks), from the midst of 
 which emerged the colossal figure of Pallas brandish- 
 ing her spear. On her right, at the extreme angle of 
 the pediment, is " Helios in chariot rising from the 
 sea " (Phibbus' car). On her immediate left is a colossal 
 group of the three Fates (who are present at every 
 birth), expressing amazement by their attitudes and by 
 their faces (according to the prints made before the 
 heads were broken). There are in the pediment other 
 figures, including a colossal Theseus, " Duke of Athens." 
 But the three things in Bottom's doggerel, the central 
 earthquake, the sun-god reining in his horses to watch 
 
 228 
 
' MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM ' 
 
 it from afar, and the amazement of the Fates, would 
 have been the most likely to catch the eye. In the 
 Homeric Hymn to Pallas (which was not translated 
 into English by Chapman until a good many years after 
 this play was printed) the subject is the same as that 
 of the Parthenon pediment, namely, the circumstances 
 attending the birth of the goddess. The earthquake 
 and the commotion of the sea are first described, with 
 the shaking of Olympus itself and the amazement of 
 the gods and goddesses thereon ; then comes specially 
 the reining in of his horses by Phoebus to watch the 
 convulsion of nature ; but the Fates are not mentioned 
 at all, although their amazement is one of the most 
 significant things in the legend in marble. Whether 
 Shakespeare had seen some model of the Parthenon, or 
 some good print of it and of its principal sculptures, or 
 some other marble showing the birth of Pallas, it does 
 not appear possible to doubt that the great Athenian 
 legend is the subject of the nonsense verses which are 
 given to Bottom to declaim as a specimen of " 'Ercles' 
 vein." 
 
 Inasmuch as the probable source of the central idea 
 of the plot, the magic juice of a flower, does not appear 
 to have been available, in the translation of Wilson 
 made for Lord Southampton, until the spring of 1596, 
 we should have to date much of the work upon the 
 play after Southampton's return from the Spanish voyage 
 in the summer of that year. This date for the composi- 
 tion would suit the hypothesis which I now advance, 
 that ' A Midsummer Night's Dream ' is the comedy 
 originally produced at Henslowe's theatre on 1 1 th May 
 1597, under the name of 'The Humours.' Henslowe 
 had already produced, in the Christmas holidays of 
 1593-94, a fairy play called Huon of Bordeaux, based on 
 the old romance which contains the original of Oberon, 
 king of the fairies ; and he would have had a good many 
 of the properties required for a fairy piece. (Greene 
 also had used the fairy-lore of Oberon in his James IV. 
 
 229 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 of Scotland.') The evidence that the summer comedy of 
 1597 was the same which was afterwards called ' A Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream ' is as follows. It was one of 
 the successful pieces of the day, having been played 
 perhaps twice a week for a good part of the summer, 
 and becoming thereafter a stock piece at the theatre. 
 Its ninth performance was on the 2 1 st of June, which 
 Henslowe has marked on the margin " Midsummer 
 day." It has often been noticed by the critics that the 
 time of Shakespeare's plot is not Midsummer, but the 
 last days of April, and May-day ; so that the name 
 which it now bears could hardly have been its original 
 name, whatever the occasion of changing it may have 
 been. ' The Comedy of Humours ' would have been a 
 suitable name for it, as a companion piece to 'The 
 Comedy of Errors ' ; for it is just a comedy of errors, 
 with the element of humours or fancies added. The 
 conjecture that Henslowe's entry of ' Timers ' may have 
 been Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour is im- 
 probable on various grounds, including the usually 
 accepted date of Jonson's play a year later. No other 
 claimant for ' The Humours ' has ever been proposed, 
 and yet it was so successful at its first production that it 
 must have been a comedy of some note. 
 
 These performances of ' The Comedy of Humours' 
 in the summer of 1597 bring us near to the date of 
 ' Love's Labour's Lost,' which was written for the 
 Court festivities at Christmas of that year.^ It contains 
 
 ™i Having given in Chapter III. the facts, as I take them, of the writing 
 of 'Love's Labour's Lost' for the private theatricals at Christmas 1597, I 
 shall add here only one point. Dumaine, who is Southampton, comes on in 
 his turn with an ode written to the Lady Katharine, his mistress. He 
 appears to have read twice from his paper, or there were tnuo versions of 
 the ode : 
 
 Dum, Once more I'll read the ode that I have writ. 
 
 Biron. Once more I'll mark how love can vary wit. 
 
 Biron indeed varied the wit himself, by writing the other version, the only 
 one printed in the text : 
 
 On a day — alack the day ! — 
 
 Love whose month is ever May, etc. 
 
 230 
 
'ROMEO AND JULIET' 
 
 a mummery of the Nine Worthies, like Bottom's, and has 
 certain other affinities, including its happy mqod, to 
 ' A Midsummer Night's Dream.' To both of them 
 one may apply that admirable judgment of a true 
 Shakespearian critic, Thomas Campbell : "Of all his 
 works the ' Midsummer Night's Dream ' leaves the 
 strongest impression on my mind, that this miserable 
 world must have, for once at least, contained a happy 
 man." 
 
 'Romeo and Juliet' 
 
 The history of the quartos of ' Romeo and Juliet ' is 
 a strange one. In 1597 the play was printed anony- 
 mously, with the action nearly the same as we now have 
 it, with the Nurse's part and Mercutio's part perfect, 
 with the two greatest scenes between Romeo and Juliet 
 complete- both in feeling and expression, and with the 
 whole conception of the star-crossed lovers fully realised. 
 In 1599 ^.nother edition was issued by a different 
 publisher, which has nearly the full Shakespearian text, 
 but is still anonymous. The changes are mostly minor 
 embellishments, with some enlargements in the three 
 last Acts. Much that might have been altered or 
 struck out with advantage has been allowed to stand 
 as originally printed. It is clear that this edition was 
 printed from an acting copy of the company to which 
 the poet belonged, for one of the stage directions is 
 "enter Will Kempe," i.e. the comedian of that name 
 in the part of Peter. From this it should follow that 
 the full text of the speeches which this quarto contains 
 
 The original version, Dumaine's own, was : 
 
 As it fell upon a day 
 . In the merry month of May, etc. 
 
 This is found in two collections of verse (of greater length in the earlier), 
 namely, in Tie Passionate Pilgrim (1599) along with other things from 
 ' Love's Labour's Lost,' and in Bodenham's miscellany, England's Helicon 
 (1600), in which latter it is signed "Ignoto," being assumed Shakespeare's 
 in the former. Two other contributors use the same signature, printed on 
 a slip pasted over the initials of Master Fulke Greville and Sir Walter 
 Raleigh. 
 
 231 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 was in the copy at the play-house. In 1609 there 
 followed a third edition, again anonymous ; and from 
 the text of that there was composed a fourth, which 
 bore no date. One or more copies of the fourth 
 impression have Shakespeare's name, but others want it. 
 The fact has been variously interpreted ; but, according 
 to the precedent of the play, by four collaborators, 
 called Sir John Oldcastle (1599), which was ascribed 
 to Shakespeare, perhaps as a joke, until a new title-page 
 was printed, it should mean that the name on the title- 
 page was unauthorised, and was cancelled as soon as the 
 mistake was discovered. The mystery of these quartos 
 will probably never be cleared up by any positive fact. 
 The best hypothesis seems to me to be, that there was a 
 collaborator who had sufficient interest in the play to 
 prevent Shakespeare's name from appearing upon any of 
 the lifetime editions. 
 
 ' Romeo and Juliet ' sprang at once into popularity, 
 and became the most famous play of the day. Although 
 neither of the two first editions bore Shakespeare's 
 name, yet the piece was already known to be by him : 
 the character of Romeo and that of Richard (meaning 
 Gloster.?) are named to his credit, along with 'Venus 
 and Adonis ' and ' Lucrece,' in an epigram printed in 
 1599 ; and in a satire of the same year Marston refers 
 to ' Romeo and Juliet ' as the fashionable piece of the 
 time, but without mentioning an author's name. 
 
 The story follows Arthur Brooke's poem Romeus and 
 Juliet closely. It is not in the plot, nor in any of the 
 incidents or " business," that we have to look for traces 
 of a collaboration, but in the execution and in the strange 
 history of the quartos. The text of the play, even 
 after the revision which it received before the second 
 quarto (1599), contains a good deal that is unlike 
 Shakespeare. The gross talk of the opening scene is 
 poor wit and serves no purpose. The long speech 
 upon Queen Mab is dragged in merely to be spoken, 
 and is in the same somewhat stiff diction as the speeches 
 
 232 
 
'ROMEO AND JULIET' 
 
 quoted from ' Edward III.,' wanting the grace and ease 
 of the fairy passages in ' A Midsummer Night's Dream.' 
 In the second quarto it is actually printed as prose (in 
 italics), and given to Mercutio, having been Benvolio's 
 in the earlier quarto (probably by mistake). Mercutio's 
 talk contains a good deal of merely verbal wit, which 
 differs in quality from Shakespeare's usual punning. 
 There is an instance in these lines (I. iv. 38) : 
 
 Rom. I'll be a candle-holder and look on. 
 The game was ne'er so fair, and I am done. 
 
 Mer. Tut, dun's the mouse, the constable's own word. 
 If thou art dun, we'll draw thee from the mire 
 Of this sir-reverence love, wherein thou stick'st. 
 
 Mercutio's three lines contain as many obscurities, 
 which have taxed the ingenuity of commentators. 
 Francis Douce, who is so often helpful in a difficulty, 
 has explained the pun upon " done " and " dun " to 
 depend firstly upon the proverb "draw Dun out of 
 the mire," meaning a cart-horse ; and secondly upon the 
 saying, " the mouse is dun," like " the cat is grey." 
 But no one has been able to explain the " constable's 
 own word," as said of " dun's the mouse." It appears 
 to me to be an allusion to the very popular comedy or 
 farce of that period, Musedorus, in which the clown is 
 Mouse, and in which there is a punning use of " con- 
 stable," as if some one of that name, say Henry 
 Constable, had had something to do with the original 
 authorship of this idyllic comedy. A similar pun 
 upon Henry Constable's name occurs in the earlier text 
 of ' Henry V.,' in a scene quite unlike Shakespeare's wit, 
 which I shall claim in the next section for the same 
 collaborator as here, namely, Lord Southampton. The 
 wit is in part indecent, and where it is not indecent it is 
 stiff or forced. One of the French princes, Bourbon, 
 is made to say, in the talk overnight before the battle 
 of Agincourt, " I once writ a sonnet in praise of my 
 horse, and began thus, Wonder of nature ! " The 
 
 233 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 Constable (of France) replies : " I have heard a sonnet 
 begin so in praise of one's mistress." Canon Ainger 
 has pointed out that one of Henry Constable's sonnets 
 to his mistress (1592 or 1594) begins : " Miracle of the 
 world ! " In his final revision of this scene for the folio 
 edition, Shakespeare left the gross talk unchanged, but 
 it is noteworthy that he took the above reply from the 
 Constable of France and gave it to the Dauphin, as if 
 he had wished to obscure the allusion to Henry 
 Constable's sonnet. 
 
 Neither the verbal wit nor the particular kind of 
 indelicacy in certain passages of ' Romeo and Juliet ' 
 are really characteristic of Shakespeare ; the occurrence 
 of the same in one or two scenes of ' Henry V.' proves 
 nothing against him, as the suspicion of another hand 
 arises there also ; while the same kind of indecency in 
 two places of ' Love's Labour's Lost ' may have a 
 similar explanation. FalstafF's grossness is of a different 
 kind, nor is it easy to find instances of suggestive 
 indecency except in the passages mentioned, although 
 the wit of suggestion was peculiarly Shakespeare's wit. 
 It is largely in the mouth of Mercutio that these 
 peculiarities are found {e.g. the old hare and the poprin 
 pear) ; and of the part of Mercutio a most instructive 
 story has been preserved by Dryden. It is that Shake- 
 speare, having been asked why he killed Mercutio in 
 the beginning of the Third Act, answered " that he was 
 forced to kill him to prevent being killed by him." 
 Dryden did not see the force of the answer. " But for 
 my part," he goes on, " I cannot find that he was so 
 dangerous a person. I see nothing in him but was so 
 excessively harmless that he might have lived to the end 
 of the play and died in his bed without offence to 
 any one." Shakespeare thought otherwise, and got rid 
 of him so as not to spoil the tragic scenes by his cynical 
 talk. If he had not killed Mercutio, " Mercutio " 
 would have killed him — meaning his collaborator 
 Southampton, whose temper was just Mercutio's. 
 
 234 
 
QUARTOS OF «KING HENRY V.' 
 
 'King Henry the Fifth' 
 
 The great patriotic play of ' Henry V.' shares with 
 • Romeo and Juliet ' the singular distinction of having 
 been published several times (1600, 1602, and 1608) in 
 Shakespeare's lifetime, but always without his name. It 
 differs, however, from the love-tragedy in having had 
 its thoroughly revised arid enlarged text kept back until 
 the folio of 1623. Whoever it was that gave the play 
 to the world in quarto (and sold three editions of it in a 
 few years), he not only withheld Shakespeare's name 
 from the title-page, but he was unable to print more than 
 half of the full text. As a work to be read at home, 
 the whole would have been, of course, better than the 
 half; for the omissions include the great choruses at 
 the beginning of each Act, and the two best speeches of 
 the king to his soldiers, as well as the new opening 
 scene by which the transformation is made from the 
 roystering Prince Hal of ' i and 2 Henry IV.' to the 
 all - accomplished statesman, churchman, and general. 
 On comparing the text of the quartos with the perfect 
 text of the folio, it will be seen that the shortness of 
 the former is due to two distinct causes : first, to a 
 good deal of systematic cutting down of needlessly 
 long speeches (the missing passages having been 
 struck out obviously en bloc) ; and secondly, to the 
 non-possession of much desirable matter by the person 
 who published the quarto. 
 
 It is the conclusion of Dr. Aldis Wright, after a 
 careful examination of the problem, that the full text, as 
 we have it first printed in 1623, had been written as 
 early as 1599, or before the publication of the first 
 quarto, and that it had been cut down for the acting 
 copy,, and printed badly. The marks of cutting down 
 for acting are clear enough in the quarto when com- 
 pared with the folio. But it is most unlikely that 
 certain of the scenes and speeches, which are not to be 
 found in the quarto, were really omitted in playing the 
 
 23s 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 piece as the sequel of *2 Henry IV.' in 1599. The 
 person who issued the quarto of 1600 was able to give 
 some new matter, on the marriage of Pistol to Nell 
 Quickly, on the death of FalstafF, and on the end of 
 Bardolph and of Nym in the war — new matter which 
 was absolutely necessary for bringing * Henry V.' into 
 line with the two parts of ' Henry IV.,' as if it were the 
 sequel of those ; but ■ in everything else the quarto was 
 the acting copy of an old play of the Battle of Agincourt, 
 with the Pistol and Fluellen scenes complete or nearly 
 so — a play which had been on the boards for a year or 
 two before the first part of ' Henry IV.' was written. 
 
 This assumed original play, beginning with the 
 recital of Henry V.'s claim to the crown of France and 
 exposition of the Salic law, and ending with the king's 
 wooing of the French Princess (the victory of Agincourt 
 being in the central place), was almost certainly the 
 play of ' Harey the V.,' which Henslowe, the theatrical 
 manager, entered in his Diary as a new piece, on 28 th 
 November 1595. This play had certainly a good run, 
 and drew good houses. The announcement made by a 
 dancer at the end of the Second Part of ' Henry IV.' 
 (1599), that "if you be not too much cloyed with fat 
 meat, our humble author will continue the story with 
 Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katharine 
 of France," ought to mean that the promised sequel, under 
 the title of ' Henry V.,' was to be the continuation of 
 Shakespeare's writing just as it was the continuation of 
 historical events. But it may have been the sequel only 
 by adaptation, just as the three originally independent 
 plays of ' Henry VI.' were made into a sequence, and 
 just as 'Henry V.' itself is joined to them by a few 
 lines in the epilogue. The ' Henry V.' of 1599 "con- 
 tinued the story with Sir John in it," in order to dispose 
 of Sir John, as well as of Bardolph, Nym, and Mistress 
 Quickly, in whose fate the public were interested ; but 
 in respect of Prince Hal as king, and of Pistol and 
 Fluellen, it can be made probable that it was in existence 
 
 236 
 
'KING HENRY V.' 
 
 for two years before the FalstafF plays. However, the 
 new play announced by the dancer was as good as new, 
 inasmuch as it was rewritten in all the great patriotic 
 speeches and scenes, and was furnished with choruses 
 which serve to link the several parts of the action.'^ 
 
 The source or germ of all these Shakespearian plays 
 on Henry IV. and Henry V. was a single play called 
 The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, containing the 
 Honourable Battell of Agin-Court, which is believed to 
 have been printed first about the year 1594, and of 
 which there is a copy in the British Museum with the date 
 of 1617. It was performed at the Bull in Bishopsgate, 
 and made famous by the comic part of Derick, played 
 by Dick Tarleton, who died in September 1588. It 
 begins with Prince Hal and his boon-companions Ned 
 (Poins) and Tom, who had been plundering on the 
 king's highway in Kent, and were then within a mile of 
 London. To them enters Sir John Oldcastle, who is 
 called Jockey. They agree to meet at "the old 
 tavern in Eastcheap." There is a scene at Court in 
 which Henry IV. deliberates with the Lords Exeter and 
 Oxford ; then a scene before the Chief Justice, in which 
 Gadshill, one of Prince Hal's followers, is sentenced for 
 theft ; the prince arrives, and gives the Chief Justice a 
 box on the ear for sentencing his man. Oldcastle shows 
 a mere trace of the peculiar wit that Shakespeare 
 developed so much in him under the same name (after- 
 wards changed to FalstafF), remarking of Henry IV. : 
 " He is a good olde man, God take him to his mercie 
 the sooner ! " Prince Hal has an interview with his 
 father on his deathbed, succeeds to the crown, puts up 
 with the old familiarity of Oldcastle (" How now, 
 Harry.?"), but tells Ned (Poins) to mend his manners. 
 This brings us to the eve of the French campaign of 
 
 1 Mr. Swinburne says {op. cit. p. 104) : " But ' King Henry V.,' we may 
 fairly say, is hardly less than transformed ; ... the general revision of style 
 by which it is at once purified and fortified extends to every nook and 
 corner of the restored and renovated building." 
 
 237 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 1414 : the Archbishop expounds Henry V.'s claim to 
 the French crown ; the prospects of a Scots invasion 
 are mentioned, with the old proverb : 
 
 He that will Scotland winne 
 Must first with France beginne. 
 
 The ambassador arrives from France and delivers the 
 tun of tennis-balls from the Dauphin. Henry answers : 
 
 But tell him that instead of balls of leather 
 We will toss him balls of brass and iron. 
 
 The campaign begins in France ; the French nobles 
 talk broken English ; the battle of Agincourt is fought, 
 with details as in Holinshed. Derick (Dick Tarleton), 
 having accompanied the army to France, is taken 
 prisoner by a Frenchman, whom he tricks cleverly. 
 He explains (like FalstafF) how he got a reputation for 
 valour : " Every day when I went to the field, I would 
 take a straw, and thrust it into my nose, and make 
 my nose bleed." The Princess Katharine enters with 
 her ladies, there is more broken English, and then the 
 wooing by the English king, marked by the same 
 bluntness which Shakespeare's play retained to the 
 last. 
 
 This old piece, which contains in outline the action of 
 three of Shakespeare's plays, contains also the germ 
 of the comic part of Locrine, John Cobbler and his 
 wife being the originals of Strumbo the cobbler, and 
 his wife Dorothy, with strict resemblance only in the 
 scene where a captain presses the cobbler for the war, 
 and in Strumbo making his nose bleed as Derick does. 
 Also, the Archbishop's argument upon the Plantagenet 
 claim to the French crown (which comes, of course, 
 from Holinshed) reappears in the opening scene of 
 ' Edward III.,' as well as of ' Henry V.' Through 
 Locrine and ' Edward III.' we get a line to the Shake- 
 speare collaborators, and an opening for the hypothesis 
 that the original ' Henry V.' (produced by Henslowe 
 
 23S 
 
'KING HENRY V; 
 
 on 28th November 1595) was the joint work of Lord 
 Southampton, Barnabe Barnes, and Shakespeare, and 
 that we have the text of that original in the anonymous 
 quartos of ' Henry V.,' with some excisions in the 
 longer speeches, and with the addition of a small 
 number of lines relating to the marriage of Pistol to 
 Mistress Quickly, the death of Falstaff, etc. It is not 
 difficult to assign their respective shares to the three 
 original collaborators. Barnes took the historical 
 framework (from Holinshed), with the laboured 
 exposition of the Salic law and of the succession, in 
 what was originally the opening scene ; Southampton 
 took the scenes with the French princes (in one of 
 which the talk is indecent), probably also the broken 
 French and the lesson in English of the Princess 
 Katharine, and the wooing of her by the king, which 
 last, as Mr. Swinburne says, is " less improved and 
 heightened in tone [after the revision of Shakespeare's 
 supposed work by himself] than we might well have 
 wished and it might well have borne " ; while Shake- 
 speare took all the comic scenes with Pistol, Fluellen, 
 etc. One small piece of evidence that Henslowe's 
 entry of ' Harey the Fift,' on 28th November 1595, 
 was the same play which afterwards took its place in 
 Shakespeare's series as if it had been new in 1599, is 
 that Henslowe enters among the theatrical properties 
 of the Lord Admiral's men, under the date of loth 
 March 1599, " i payer of hosse for the Dowlfen" — 
 one pair of hose for the Dauphin (who is made almost 
 a comic part in the scene of the French camp before 
 Agincourt), the date of the inventory, loth March, 
 being too soon for that production of ' Henry V. ' 
 which contained the topical allusion to Essex's expected 
 return from Ireland in the autumn of 1599. Another 
 and more conclusive piece of evidence for the earlier 
 date is, that Pistol's punishment is mentioned in a book 
 which must have been printed first before 1599, and 
 probably before 1597. This is Nicholas Breton's Paste 
 
 239 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 with a Packet of Mad Letters, a kind of complete 
 letter-writer not so much for models of correspondence 
 as for amusement and edification in imagined situations. 
 In the 22nd letter Mistress Fubs replies to Master 
 Wyldgoose, who had been trying to frighten her : 
 " Master Wyldgoose, it is not your huftie-tuftie can 
 make me afraid of your big looks ; for I saw the 
 play of Ancient Pistol, where a craking coward was 
 well cudgelled for his knavery." She had remembered 
 the play by its comic part, and actually calls it by the 
 name of that, as if the king himself had not been so 
 commanding a figure in it as he is now. The original 
 date of this book is not known, the earliest existing 
 copy being of the year 1603, and probably of the 
 third edition. There is, however, internal evidence in 
 the 8 th letter that it had been in existence before 
 ' Romeo and Juliet ' was written. The very natural 
 touch of the Nurse in recalling her own child, who was 
 of an age with Juliet : 
 
 Well, Susan is with God ; 
 She was too good for me, — 
 
 is one that needs no outside source ; but the hint 
 of it is found in Breton's letter upon the death of 
 Susanna : " being too good for this world, she is sure 
 gone to a better " ; while the whole purport of the 
 letter, to deprecate unreasonable grief for the dead, is 
 conveyed closely into the speech of Friar Laurence 
 (in the second quarto), where Juliet is found supposed 
 dead in her bed, ending with the very spirit of cold 
 comfort as in the letter ^ : 
 
 1 "A letter of comfortable advice to a friend, who sorrowed for the 
 death of his love : 
 
 " Honest Alexander, I heare thou art of late fallen into an extreame 
 melancholy, by reason of the sudden departure of Susanna out of this 
 life : for thy sake I am sorry she hath left her passage on this earth, 
 though being too good for this world, she is sure gone to a better ; now if 
 thy mourning could recover her from death, I would willingly beare part of 
 thy passion : but when it doth her no good, and thy selfe much hurt, let 
 not a wilful! humor lead thee into a woeful! consumption. Thou knowest 
 
 24a 
 
'KING HENRY V.' 
 
 For though some nature bids us all lament, 
 Yet nature's tears are reason's merriment. 
 
 The germ of Pistol appears first, as I have main- 
 tained in a former chapter, in the comic part of 
 Basilisco, which Shakespeare had written for Kyd's 
 play of S oilman and Perseda in 1592. Basilisco and 
 Pistol are both alike drawn from Barnabe Barnes, whose 
 real experiences in the French campaign under Essex 
 in 1 59 1 are satirised by Nash in prose and by Campion 
 in verse, and recalled by himself in the military section 
 of his Four Books of Offices (1606). The incident of 
 Fluellen making Pistol eat the leek is likely enough to 
 have been based on one of many stories told of Barnes 
 in Essex's campaign. One of the charges againt Essex 
 by the Council, on his return from the war in 1591, 
 was of " trailing a pike," or sharing the work of the 
 common soldiers (which Barnes also records of him in 
 his book of 1606). Pistol meets the king incognito, 
 and addresses him : " Trail'st thou the puissant pike ? " 
 The following description of Pistol by Gower is exactly 
 the account of Barnes given by Nash : 
 
 Gower. Why, 'tis a gull, a fool, a rogue, that now and then 
 goes to the wars, to grace himself at his return into London under 
 the form of a soldier. And such fellows are perfect in the great 
 commanders' names j and they will learn you by rote where 
 services were done : at such and such a sconce, at such a breach, 
 at such a convoy ; who came oiF bravely, who was shot, who 
 disgraced, what terms the enemy stood on ; and this they con 
 perfectly in the phrase of war, which they trick up with new-tuned 
 
 she is senselesse in the grave, and wilt thou therefore be witlesse in the 
 world ? Say love is extreame, and let mee beleeve it ; wilt thou there- 
 fore deprive nature of reason ? God forbid," etc. 
 
 About the same time (1596) that Shakespeare found this in Breton's 
 Paste luith a Packet, he wrote for him a copy of verses, signed W. S., to 
 prefix to another of his many books, Wifs Will or Will's Wit, beginning 
 with — 
 
 What shall I say of gold more than 'tis gold ? 
 
 which has an unmistakable sameness with the opening of the 84th 
 
 Sonnet : 
 
 Who is it that says most, which can say more, 
 Than this rich praise, that you alone are you ? 
 
 241 R 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 oaths : and what a beard of the general's cut, and a horrid shout 
 of the camp will do among foaming bottles and ale-washed wits, is 
 wonderful to be thought on. But you must learn to know such 
 slanders of the age, or else you may be marvellously mistook. 
 
 Fluellen. I tell you what. Captain Gower, he is not the man 
 I did take him to be. 
 
 This plausible person, found out at length, is both 
 Pistol and ParoUes, and the actual Barnabe Barnes. 
 The ridiculing of the latter by Shakespeare in a play 
 for which he probably made the plot, is the same 
 audacious fun as the ridiculing of Barnes under the 
 guise of Strumbo in the first comic scene of his own 
 play of Locrine, and again under the guise of Lodowick, 
 the poet-pimp, in ' Edward III.,' which was his work 
 in most of the Acts. It is to the same period as those 
 two plays, about 1594-95, that I would assign the 
 Pistol of ' Henry V.,' so that he would have been an 
 earlier creation than FalstafF, and attached to Sir John 
 in ' 2 Henry IV.' and ' The Merry Wives of Windsor ' 
 only as a convenient way of keeping a popular part 
 upon the stage. 
 
 It was maintained by the late Mr. Richard Simpson 
 that ' Henry V.' showed a political bias and had a 
 political aim, which was that of Lord Essex and his 
 friends. In my view, the relation of the play to Essex 
 is not abstract but picturesque, namely, in the por- 
 traiture of King Henry after Essex himself. But if 
 the policy of the latter be discoverable in it also, that 
 would suit my hypothesis of Southampton's share in 
 it. The anti-Scottish feeling is far more obvious in 
 ' Edward III.,' and was inspired there, I should sup- 
 pose, by Southampton. But the historical play which is 
 the most complete, as well as adroit, exposition of the 
 political principles of Southampton and Essex is the 
 one which I have reserved to the end of this group — 
 ' Richard II.' 
 
 242 
 
A POLITICAL PLAY 
 
 ' King Richard the Second ' 
 
 ' Richard II.' is one of a group of three historical 
 plays — the other two being ' Richard III.' and ' Henry 
 IV.' (afterwards ' i Henry IV.') — which were all published 
 originally without the author's name, and all reprinted 
 about a year after (the publisher being the same) as " by 
 William Shakespeare." They were copyrighted by 
 Wise, the publisher, respectively on 29th August 1597, 
 20th October 1597, and 25th February 1598. The 
 reprints (within a year) were by other printers than 
 those of the original editions, but the texts are virtually 
 the same. Shakespeare's name had appeared only once 
 before on the title-page of a play, 'Love's Labour's 
 Lost' (early in 1598), and his initials as the corrector 
 on that of Locrine (1595) ; while his two poems, ' Venus 
 and Adonis ' and ' Lucrece,' had always borne his 
 name. Wise, who published the three historical plays 
 mentioned, was also the original publisher of the 
 'Second Part of Henry IV.' (in 1600). There is 
 therefore no reason to suppose that the omission of 
 the author's name from the first editions of three of the 
 historical plays was without his consent ; the history of 
 the title-pages merely means that, after 1598, he found 
 it expedient to affix his name to his work. He did so 
 uniformly thereafter, except in the cases of ' Romeo and 
 Juliet ' and Henry V.' (as well as ' Titus Andronicus,' 
 which is in a different class). 
 
 Coleridge pronounced 'Richard II.' to be "the most 
 admirable of Shakespeare's purely historical plays." It is 
 purely a chronicle-history, like ' Richard III.,' without 
 any admixture of comedy, as in 'Henry IV.,' ' Henry V.,' 
 and ' Edward III.' It follows Holinshed closely, and 
 points the same moral of the reign as that chronicler 
 does, namely, that Richard's dethronement was in- 
 evitable sooner or later, owing to his arbitrary treatment 
 of princes of the blood royal and of English nobles. 
 The pathos of the king's fall from power had been 
 
 243 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 touched with admirable grace by Samuel Daniel in his 
 Civil Wars, from which Shakespeare must have taken 
 hints. Notwithstanding the high praise which Coleridge 
 gives it, any one who will try the experiment of 
 reading it through at a sitting, keeping a lookout for 
 inequalities of merit, will not fail to find them. It is 
 this that probably explains Dr. Johnson's quaint remark 
 on ' Richard II.' : " This play is one of those which 
 Shakespeare has apparently revised." He has revised 
 it because it was not all his own originally, and he has 
 left the marks of the revision. Much of the First Act 
 on the quarrel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray, 
 and the lists at Coventry, is Holinshed padded out 
 with verbiage to make blank verse. John of Gaunt's 
 speeches are so various in quality as to be a problem. As 
 to one of them, which contains a monotonous series of 
 puns upon his own name, we may well wonder why it 
 was allowed to stand. The frequent occurrence of 
 passages in rhyme is explained, I believe, by the rule, 
 that Shakespeare found it easier to enliven a dull piece 
 of blank verse by turning it into rhyme, as if he were 
 paraphrasing it, than by treating the matter in an 
 original way. The following are the characteristics 
 assigned to this play in the Clarendon Press edition : 
 " Elaborate conceits, forced antitheses, and verbal puns, 
 besides a stilted, unnatural phraseology and a kind of 
 stiffness in the diction — sentences and clauses being 
 often coincident with the lines." If this had been said 
 of those parts of ' Edward III.' which I have given 
 reasons for assigning to Lord Southampton, most of it 
 would have been exactly true ; while the " verbal 
 puns " are true of some parts of ' Romeo and Juliet ' 
 and 'Henry V.' 
 
 When we come to the drawing of character, the 
 inequalities are as marked as is the style. Mr. 
 Swinburne concluded that Shakespeare had devoted 
 himself to King Richard only, and had been negligent 
 with all the rest. He finds the characters of York, 
 
 244 
 
'KING RICHARD II.' 
 
 Norfolk, and Aumerle to be always " fitful, shifting, 
 vaporous. . . . They are ghosts, not men." Yet none, 
 he declares, are more important to the scheme of the 
 play after Richard himself. The scenes in the Fifth Act 
 between the young Aumerle, partisan of the dethroned 
 king, and his father and mother are not only impossible 
 historically, but are hard and unnatural on the one side 
 and hysterical on the other. 
 
 The distinguished poet, distinguished also by his 
 studies of the Elizabethan dramatists, calls Act V. Scene 
 iii. " the worst and weakest scene of all. ... It would be 
 easy, agreeable, and irrational to ascribe, without further 
 evidence than its badness, this misconceived and mis- 
 shapen scene to some other hand than Shakespeare's. 
 ... It is false, wrong, artificial beyond the worst of his 
 bad and boyish work." And yet, in the scene leading 
 up to it, one comes upon these famous lines, with the 
 unmistakable ring of Shakespeare's own voice in them : 
 
 Tork. As in a theatre the eyes of men, 
 After a well-graced actor leaves the stage. 
 Are idly bent on him that enters next, 
 Thinking his prattle to be tedious : 
 Even SQ, or with much more contempt, men's eyes 
 Did scowl on gentle Richard. 
 
 Something of that very effect is produced on the reader 
 by those very lines : the grand style ends before long, 
 the well-graced actor goes off, and the tedious prattle 
 begins ; and I am not sure that Shakespeare did not 
 intend a sly joke at the expense of his noble col- 
 laborator. 
 
 Lastly, as to the political tendency of * Richard II.' 
 That it had a political drift is proved by the fact that 
 part of the plan of Essex and his friends in the con- 
 spiracy of February 1601 was to have this tragedy 
 specially resuscitated from among the old plays of the 
 Globe Theatre for the sake of its effect upon the minds 
 of the citizens. It was given, by request, on the after- 
 noon of Saturday, the 7 th of February, the conspiracy 
 
 24s 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 coming to a head the next morning. Augustine Phillips, 
 one of Shakespeare's fellow-actors and his friend, was 
 cited as a witness in the inquiry that followed, and 
 explained that they had been given forty shillings to 
 produce the play, because it was " old and so long out 
 of use " that they would have but a small house at it. 
 None of the Globe people were put on their trial as 
 accessories ; but Shakespeare, in the sonnet which he 
 wrote on the occasion, admits that he had his fears : 
 
 Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul 
 Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come. 
 Can yet the lease of my true love control. 
 Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom. 
 
 The Queen had said on one occasion, in ironical refer- 
 ence to the discontent at her arbitrary conduct towards 
 individuals, " Do you not know that I am Richard II. ? " 
 Lord Southampton had been especially the object of 
 her intolerance, so far so that she had objected to his 
 appointment by Lord Essex as his General of the Horse 
 in the Irish campaign two years before. In the con- 
 spiracy he was Essex's right-hand man ; but it is not 
 easy to say how early in his career he had begun to 
 kick against the Queen's methods of governing, and to 
 sympathise with Essex. The doubts on that point are 
 due to the assertions of Bacon in his official account of 
 the origin of the Essex conspiracy. His argument was, 
 that Essex had been plotting for a long time, but that 
 Southampton had joined him merely on private and 
 domestic grounds: "Having been at some emulations 
 and differences with him in Court in former times, but 
 having married his kinswoman [in 1598] and plunged 
 himself wholly into his fortune, and being his con- 
 tinual associate in Ireland [in 1599], he accounted 
 of him as most assured unto him." This history of 
 Southampton's political sympathies is improbable on the 
 face of it ; inasmuch as he had accompanied Essex, and 
 been "his continual associate" quite as much as in 
 
 246 
 
' THE CONCEIT OF RICHARD II.' 
 
 Ireland, on his two voyages of 1596 and 1597. It 
 is indeed on the occasion of the latter voyage that we 
 hear first of ' Richard II.,' and from a source which is 
 most significant for the original political design of the 
 play and for the direct personal interest of statesmen 
 in its composition. When the ships were lying at 
 Weymouth, outward bound, Southampton being in 
 command of one of them, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote 
 from that port to Cecil on 6th July 1597 (Cal. State 
 Papers) : " The Lord General [Essex] was wonderful 
 merry at the conceit of Richard II. I hope it will 
 never alter, and shall be glad of it as the true way to 
 our good, quiet, and advancement ; and most of all 
 for her sake whose affairs will thereupon find better 
 progression." There are several points of interest in 
 these few lines. The " conceit of Richard II." must 
 have been the forthcoming tragedy, which was entered 
 for copyright seven weeks after (29th August) and 
 published anonymously the same year. Cecil must 
 have known what was meant by the conceit, and could 
 have heard of it from Southampton, whom he knew 
 intimately as his father's ward. But is it not probable 
 that Essex had been " wonderful merry at the conceit " 
 on being told of it for the first time ? Raleigh hopes 
 that " it will never alter," meaning perhaps that Essex's 
 amused reception of the idea of bringing the precedent 
 of Richard II. before the mind of Elizabeth would 
 become a fixed policy with him. It did become his 
 policy in the years following, and Raleigh turned it 
 against him to his ruin. It was characteristic of Essex 
 to need prompting, and the prompter in the political 
 plot of ' The Tempest ' is Antonio. 
 
 He had also his own occasions for reflecting upon 
 the arbitrary rule of the Queen, who had interfered to 
 prevent his marrying where and when he pleased. The 
 moral of the arbitrary reign of Richard II., leading up 
 to his inevitable deposition, as it is drawn out plainly 
 by Holinshed, was just the subject to attract him. His 
 
 247 
 
SOUTHAMPTON AS COLLABORATOR 
 
 natural disposition was not such as to submit tamely to 
 the arbitrary humours of Elizabeth ; we may take that 
 on the evidence of his friend Sir Charles Davers, who 
 wrote to him (Cal. Cecil MSB., ix. 246) from London in 
 July 1599, at the time when the Queen had ordered his 
 recall from the Irish war, that her Majesty might be the 
 more easily persuaded to alter her mind " if you would 
 be moved to use your own pen in such a style as is 
 no less fit for this time than contrary to your disposi- 
 tion, it being apparent that her Majesty's ill conceit is 
 as much grounded upon the sternness of your carriage 
 as upon the foundation of any other offence." The 
 only attraction that the theme of Richard appears to 
 have had for Shakespeare was the idea of the fall of 
 princes and of the sacredness of a crowned head, which 
 had been already an attraction to Marlowe in his 
 Edward II. For the rest, we may take ' Richard II.' 
 to have been a design of Southampton's, one of those 
 calculated attempts of Antonio, in ' The Tempest,' to 
 
 set all hearts i' the State 
 To what tune pleased his ear. 
 
 248 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE QUARREL WITH SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 Nothing in Prospero's story of his life is more impres- 
 sive than the treachery of Antonio. He relates it to 
 Miranda with a laboured care, which recalls Hamlet's 
 injunction to Horatio : " In this harsh world draw thy 
 breath with pain to tell my story." He was wounded 
 in the house of his friend, surprised whUst he was pre- 
 occupied with the bettering of his mind, awakened out 
 of a pleasant dream. It ended in his exile to an island ; 
 and after twelve years, when his enemies are brought 
 thither to have their audit made up, it is still Antonio 
 whose account is hardest to settle. Alonso stands for 
 a somewhat different chapter of his life ; but that he 
 has no wish to reopen : 
 
 There, sir, stop : 
 
 Let us not burthen our remembrance with 
 
 A heaviness that's gone. 
 
 To understand this parable, it has been necessary to 
 go back to Shakespeare's earlier years in London, and 
 to piece together, as one best can from sources both 
 internal and external, the history of his intimacy with 
 Lord Southampton, and of their collaboration during 
 four years. From all that one can gather, it appears 
 to have been the happiest and most buoyant period of 
 Shakespeare's life. It was followed by a year of separa- 
 tion, owing to Southampton's absence on foreign service 
 and pleasure, during which the great Falstaff plays were 
 written ; and then, in the year 1599, came the crisis in 
 
 249 
 
THE QUARREL WITH SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 the poet's career. If we had only the Sonnets as auto- 
 biographical documents we might suppose that nothing 
 made a deeper irtipression upon his life than his entangle- 
 ment with Mistress Fitton ; but ' The Tempest ' is his 
 final retrospect, and in that authoritative review the 
 outstanding thing is the quarrel with Southampton. 
 It is related, of course, from his own point of view ; 
 but the feelings of pained surprise and indignation, and 
 the sense of " high wrongs " are to be received as 
 genuine. We have now to find, if we can, the external 
 facts corresponding with that inward crisis. 
 
 It is to be observed, that one condition of Shake- 
 speare's dramatic work down to the spring of 1598 was 
 its anonymity. Perhaps that was the understanding 
 with his patron, who may have taken the poet at his 
 word in dedicating Lucrece in 1594: "All that I have 
 to do is yours." After the month of August 1597, when 
 Southampton sailed with Essex on the voyage to the 
 Azores, he was not again at leisure for collaboration in 
 literary work during several years. On his return from 
 the Azores he was about the Court for a few weeks, 
 until he left for Paris in the middle of February 1598, 
 with the embassy of Sir Robert Cecil ; he was travelling 
 with ten servants and six horses, and had leave of absence 
 for two years, intending to visit Italy. As it happened, 
 he spent the next seven months in Paris (all but a few 
 days in August, when he ran over to be married), 
 absorbed in a vortex of gambling and dissipation, which 
 exhausted his means and required the help or counsel 
 of Lord Essex to extricate him. In that interval Shake- 
 speare began to assert himself on his title-pages and 
 otherwise, first in ' Love's Labour's Lost,' thereafter 
 upon new editions of three other plays which had been 
 anonymous up to that time. In the autumn of the 
 same year, 1598, there appeared the most explicit claim 
 that was ever made for him in his lifetime as an uni- 
 versal master of the poetic arts, in the Palladis Tamia 
 of Francis Meres, a work which contains a survey of 
 
 250 
 
SHAKESPEARE CLAIMS THE PLAYS 
 
 contemporary English poetry ; he is mentioned in it 
 nine times, as the author of elegiac and heroic verse, of 
 sugared sonnets among his private friends, and of no 
 fewer than a dozen comedies, histories, and tragedies. 
 Four plays published with his name in a single year, 
 and the bold advertisement through Meres of a round 
 dozen to his credit, must have brought the name of 
 Shakespeare into great and sudden prominence. 
 
 When Lord Southampton returned to London in 
 November 1598, embarrassed in his affairs and doubt- 
 less in a harder and more cynical mood than usual, he 
 found Shakespeare's name, in Meres's literary gossip, 
 attached with no reserve to several plays, including the 
 famous ' Romeo and Juliet,' which he believed himself 
 to have had no small share in designing and writing. 
 It appears from the 94th Sonnet, written about a year 
 after, that Southampton was the perfect master of his 
 face, one of those who " do not do the things they most 
 do show " ; and it may be inferred from that, as well 
 as from the outwardly cordial demeanour of Antonio 
 at the corresponding juncture in ' The Tempest,' that 
 he made no sign of his surprise and dissatisfaction. 
 Shortly after the New Year, 1599, came the death of 
 Spenser, the great funeral in the Abbey, at which the 
 poets bore the pall, and the question who was to be the 
 new Poet Laureate. It appears from the testimonial 
 in verse by Francis Davison to Samuel Daniel, that 
 several did aspire to the Laurel Crown "with hot 
 desire." In the same weeks there was much bustle 
 over the expedition to Ireland under Essex, in which 
 Southampton was nominated by the General to the 
 command of the cavalry. He left London in the end 
 of March, and did not return until October. In that 
 interval the question of the laureateship was virtually 
 settled, or rather it was shelved. Shakespeare's Sonnets 
 make it clear, as I have shown in the second Chapter, 
 that he had been counting on the support of Lord 
 Herbert, who stood at that time high in the Queen's 
 
 251 
 
THE QUARREL WITH SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 favour, and that the apparent reason why his lordship 
 failed him was, that his " countenance " had " filled up 
 the line " or certificate of Samuel Daniel. But it was 
 seen before long, by Daniel himself as well as by others, 
 that his candidature had been only a blind ; the expected, 
 perhaps promised, patent for the ofiice and pension was 
 never forthcoming, although Daniel became the quasi- 
 laureate, and was in receipt of some indirect emolument 
 from the Queen. Shakespeare was kept out, but no 
 one else was admitted to the formal dignity, until 
 sixteen years after, when Ben Jonson was appointed by 
 Letters Patent, his great rival being near his end. 
 
 The 94th Sonnet is proof enough that Shakespeare 
 had found out, very soon after the disappointment which 
 he expresses ironically to Lord Herbert in the 87th 
 Sonnet, that his secret enemy had been Southampton, 
 and that Lord Herbert had been the instrument of the 
 latter at Court, It is with the help of Alonso that 
 Antonio effects the deposition of Prospero, by a stroke 
 of policy sudden and unexpected : 
 
 One midnight 
 Fated to the purpose did Antonio open 
 The gates of Milan ; and i' the dead of daricness 
 The ministers for the purpose hurried thence 
 Me and thy crying self, 
 
 — the little Miranda, not yet " out three years old " 
 (counting from the publication of ' Romeo and Juliet' 
 in 1597). One condition of this singular coup d'etat 
 was, that Milan should lose its independence — " alas, 
 poor Milan, the dukedom yet unbowed." Shakespeare 
 was refused (the political allegory requires that he 
 should be deprived of) the poet's Crown, but it had to 
 be placed in commission so long as he lived. It is this 
 same treatment of the royal emblem of Poetry that 
 explains the inward meaning of one of Hamlet's mad 
 outbursts of passion. He is speaking ostensibly of his 
 father's crown, and of Claudius' usurpation of it ; but 
 
 252 
 
THE LAUREL CROWN 
 
 the details are quite inapt to Claudius (the excuse being 
 that Hamlet was in one of his mad fits), inasmuch as 
 that sovereign wore the crown with dignity, and must 
 have been elected to it formally by the Estates of the 
 Realm of Denmark, whether he had poisoned his 
 
 brother or not : 
 
 A vice [i.e. fool] of kings, 
 A cutpurse of the empire and the rule, 
 That from a shelf the precious diadem stole 
 And put it in his pocket ! . . . 
 A king of shreds and patches. 
 
 This is not Claudius, it is some one who lay deeper in 
 Hamlet's thoughts. It was the Laurel Crown which 
 had been upon a shelf since Spenser's death, having 
 been placed in commission so that Shakespeare might 
 not succeed to it ; Southampton had as it were put it 
 in his pocket because he was unable to wear it ; he was 
 " a king of shreds and patches," inasmuch as shreds 
 and patches were all his title to the authorship of the 
 plays. Both in the mad outburst of Hamlet and in 
 the political parable of Prospero, there is a want of 
 exact correspondence with the facts of the literary 
 "usurpation," or of Shakespeare's own view of the 
 facts ; but that, of course, is inevitable in an allegorical 
 presentation of them. 
 
 Apart from the identification of Lord Southampton 
 with Antonio, the unnatural and treacherous brother 
 of Prospero, there is some external evidence that the 
 friendly relations between Shakespeare and his patron 
 had not continued many years. I shall take first a 
 letter from the Countess of Southampton to her husband, 
 preserved among the Cecil Papers at Hatfield, which 
 was thought of so great interest that it was printed in 
 advance of the still unfinished Calendar. The letter is 
 upon certain business affairs of Lady Rich, with whom 
 the Countess was staying at Lord Essex's house, Chartley, 
 in Staffordshire, and would be of no importance now 
 but for its postscript. She adds, as an item that she 
 
 253 
 
THE QUARREL WITH SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 knew her husband would be interested in, a piece of 
 gossip which had reached her as " a secret," that " Sir 
 John FalstafF had been made the father of a pretty 
 miller's thumb [a kind of fish], all head and very little 
 body, by his Mistress Dame Pintpot." The description 
 is correct to nature for one of those immature births 
 that are sometimes preserved in spirits as museum 
 specimens, in which condition her ladyship had doubt- 
 less seen one, perhaps in the back parlour of some 
 apothecary. The gossip is wicked in form, the associa- 
 tion of the father with the stage FalstafF being dis- 
 reputable, and of the mother with Mistress Quickly 
 (Dame Pintpot) degrading. It is fairly certain that 
 by Sir John FalstafF was meant the creator and (as I 
 believe) impersonator of that character, and by his 
 Mistress Dame Pintpot was meant Mistress Fitton, 
 who was a former companion of Mistress Bess Vernon 
 in the Maids' Chamber at Court during two years or 
 more before she became Countess of Southampton. 
 The date of the letter is the 8th of July, in a year 
 which is not stated but can be brought within a narrow 
 limit by the context. The Countess mentions that Lady 
 Rich had written on the same day to " her brother." 
 Her only surviving brother was Lord Essex ; he was 
 executed in February 1601 ; Lady Southampton was 
 not married until August 1598 ; therefore the month 
 of July in which the letter was written must have been 
 either that of 1599 or of 1600. In July of both years 
 Lord Southampton was in Ireland. There is some 
 collateral evidence in favour of 1 600 ; for it has been 
 inferred from the 99th Sonnet ("The forward violet 
 thus did I chide"), and made probable by two references 
 in the Sidney Letters, that the same mishap which 
 befell Mistress Dame Pintpot, befell also Mistress Fitton 
 in the early spring of 1600, the only discrepancy 
 between the somewhat belated gossip and the reality 
 being that it was Lord Herbert who was the father of 
 the still-born progeny and not Sir John FalstafF. 
 
 254 
 
FICKLE PATRONAGE 
 
 Another probable indication of the breach between 
 poet and patron, subject to the same disadvantage as 
 the last in not explicitly naming the parties, is found 
 in one of Drayton's Eclogues, which he had rewritten 
 some time after the death of Elizabeth in 1603 ("Eliza 
 when she lived " is a phrase which occurs in the context). 
 He writes bitterly and angrily of his own desertion by 
 his patroness, whom he calls Selena (believed to have 
 been Lucy Harington, Countess of Bedford), and then 
 comes to another case like his own : 
 
 No other is the steadfastness of those 
 
 On whom even Nature wills us to rely. 
 
 Frail is it that the elements compose, 
 
 Such is the state of all mortality. 
 
 That, as the humour in the blood doth move, 
 Lastly do hate what lately they did love. 
 
 So did great Olcon, which a Phoebus seemed. 
 Whom all good shepherds gladly flock'd about : 
 And as a god of Rowland was esteem'd 
 Which to his praise drew all the rural rout. 
 
 For after Rowland as it had been Pan, 
 
 Only to Olcon every shepherd ran. 
 
 But he forsakes the herdgroom and his flocks, 
 
 Nor of his bagpipes takes at all no keep, 
 
 But to the stern wolf and deceitful fox 
 
 Leaves the poor shepherd and his harmless sheep. 
 And all those rhymes that he of Olcon sung, 
 The swain disgraced, participate the wrong. 
 
 All that we know of these idyllic names is, that Rowland 
 is Drayton himself. The shepherds are the poets, and 
 the "herdgroom" who is specially marked as the 
 individual forsaken by Olcon was probably a leader 
 amongst them, according to Peek's uses of the word 
 " groom " in the same pastoral imagery. Great Olcon, 
 who seemed a very Apollo, and drew all the poets 
 around him, suggests to me Southampton ; but he may 
 suggest some other noble patron to others — such is our 
 
 255 
 
THE QUARREL WITH SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 subjectivity.! At all events, the moral of this par- 
 ticular incident, whether it relates to Southampton and 
 Shakespeare or to some other patron and some other 
 poet, is the same that we find in the allegory of ' The 
 Tempest ' — " lastly do hate what lately they did love." 
 Thirdly, if Southampton had remained his friend to 
 the end, it is remarkable that nothing should have 
 been said, of him in the dedication of the folio of 1623 
 in his lordship's lifetime. The dedication is to Lord 
 Pembroke, and to his brother and heir Lord Montgomery 
 (who cared for nothing but horses and dogs and to be 
 thought an honest man, according to Clarendon). 
 There must have been some reason for passing over 
 Lord Southampton, the patron of whom Shakespeare 
 once wrote : " The love I dedicate to your lordship is 
 without end." On the other hand, his affection for 
 Pembroke, and his passionate desire to retain his friend- 
 ship, are proved beyond question by the Sonnets. The 
 dedication of them eight years after proves that their 
 quarrel had been made up. The dedication of the 
 folio — the marriage of his child and heir Miranda to 
 the heir of Naples — is the fulfilment by his executors 
 of what must have been his expressed wish. The 
 nobleman whom he thus chose to associate with his own 
 fame, although never his patron so far as we know, 
 was the man whom he admired most. As Lord 
 
 * It is not easy to recall any patron of whom, or to whom, any poet had 
 sung so much as is implied in the line " all those rhymes that he of Olcon 
 sung," if the words be taken literally. The largest body of such verse is 
 Shakespeare's Sonnets to Lord Pembroke ; but the latter was not a patron 
 in the sense that Selena is acknowledged elsewhere by Drayton to have been 
 his ; and the Sonnets were not published until three or four years after the 
 latest possible date of this passage. On the other hand, if "rhymes" and 
 " sung " be not taken literally of lyric poetry, the reference might quite well 
 be to parts in plays for which Olcon had been the original. If the rhymes 
 had been sung to Olcon, the reference might easily have been to the 
 dedications of 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece,' which continued to be 
 prefixed to the numerous editions of those poems during many years, and 
 would have sounded strangely at length, if the author and his patron had 
 been known to have fallen out. It was not unusual to cancel a dedication 
 in a new edition, if the relations of parties had changed. Daniel did that 
 to Fulke Greville, and Drayton himself to the Countess of Bedford. 
 
 256 
 
PROOFS OF COOLNESS 
 
 Clarendon says of him, he was " the most universally 
 loved and esteemed of any man of that age," and " as 
 he had a great number of friends, so no man had ever 
 the wickedness to avow himself to be his enemy " — or, 
 in Shakespeare's case, not his enemy for long. 
 
 There is still a fourth proof, which may also be 
 called external evidence, that Shakespeare did not retain 
 the friendship of Southampton, It is found in the 
 somewhat startling discovery that the plot of 'All's 
 Well that Ends Well ' is made to follow very closely 
 the behaviour of Lord Southampton in the aiFair of his 
 marriage with Mistress Bess Vernon in the autumn of 
 1598. If Count Bertram be Southampton, his lordship 
 does not show to advantage ; the portrait is not malicious, 
 but it is unflattering ; and it is hardly conceivable that 
 it would have been exhibited in a play if the author had 
 been still on good terms with the supposed subject of 
 it, inasmuch as it recalls the least pleasing side of his 
 character. The same comedy contains also the original 
 portrait of ParoUes, whom I have sought to identify 
 with Barnabe Barnes by a large array of internal evidence. 
 Although the proof depends somewhat upon taking 
 Parolles and Bertram together, yet it is more convenient 
 to take out the story of Bertram and Helena and retell 
 it apart. 
 
 Bertram and Helena 
 
 The parts of Bertram and Helena are changed 
 materially from those in the original story of Boccaccio, 
 or in the English version of it. Whenever Shakespeare 
 varies from his originals he may be assumed to have a 
 deep purpose, for the reason that he never practised 
 variation merely for the sake of novelty : he takes from 
 Plutarch and Hollnshed almost literally, and in the 
 parallel case of 'Romeo and Juliet' he follows the 
 Italian story very closely. The original story in this 
 case was " Beltramo and Giletta." Giletta is Juliet ; 
 and as he had used that name before, he changed it to 
 
 257 s 
 
THE QUARREL WITH SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 Helena, the name of the lover of Demetrius in 'A 
 Midsummer Night's Dream,' as well as the name of 
 one of Juliet's companions in Verona (all three being 
 probably the same real person). She remains, of course, 
 the daughter of the famous surgeon of Narbonne, 
 deceased, and is found, as in the story, living at the 
 Court of Rousillon ; but in the story the surgeon's 
 daughter is rich as well as beautiful. She had grown 
 up along with the young count from childhood, the 
 familiar intimacy on her part ripening into love, while 
 on his part there was no such development — a common 
 case. Beltramo goes to Court, with no thought of 
 Giletta's love for him, and enters on the great world 
 fancy free. Giletta follows him, and forces herself in 
 marriage upon him by the same artifice as in our play. 
 Beltramo's cavalier desertion of her is natural enough, 
 as he had been tricked into the marriage, and had as 
 little love for her at last as at first. The king knows 
 the circumstances quite well, and is reluctant to fulfil 
 his bargain with Giletta when he sees where her choice 
 has fallen. The marriage is completed formally, and 
 Giletta, in a thoroughly business spirit, goes back to 
 Rousillon, takes possession of her husband's estate, and 
 administers it in his absence with great success and 
 popularity (there is no old Countess of Rousillon in the 
 original). After a time she goes on the pilgrimage to 
 St. James, not in secret, but with the fidl knowledge 
 and approval of her subjects, goes through all her 
 adventures at Florence, and returns to Rousillon in due 
 time with two stout boys in her arms, to be received 
 by Beltramo without any hesitation as the mother of 
 his children, and to live with him happily ever after. 
 Beltramo had been merely an unwilling husband, the 
 victim of a trick. No odium attaches to his conduct ; 
 he does not whimper 'O my ParoUes, they have 
 married me ! ' having no such evil counsellor near him ; 
 he goes to the wars to escape his wife, but not in the 
 same temper as Bertram. In the last scene he does not 
 
 ?S8 
 
COUNT BERTRAM 
 
 enter upon a labyrinth of unscrupulous lying In order 
 to clear himself and to embarrass the poor women ; nor 
 is there any project of his marrying another lady, as 
 Bertram is meant to marry the daughter of Lord 
 Lafeu. Shakespeare had his own private intention in 
 making these radical changes. Helena's situation is 
 delicately indicated by her confusion and her mysteriously 
 irrelevant or ambiguous answers, as well as by the 
 passionate talking to herself and other signs of distress 
 which the steward overheard. Bertram, in like manner, 
 is conscious of something else than the inequality and 
 arbitrariness of the marriage, which are the just griev- 
 ances of Beltramo. His conduct is, for some occult 
 reason, callous and heartless, abetted by Parolles, but 
 excused by no one else. Helena had the entire sympathy 
 of the old countess, who disowns her son for deserting 
 his wife. She was judged worthy of her new station, 
 and was ennobled in her own right by the king. She 
 was commended heartily by the Lord Lafeu for her 
 virtues as well as her beauty ; and she was pitied by 
 Bertram's brother officers, who expressed themselves 
 somewhat plainly about his heartless conduct. Helena's 
 resolution to justify herself before the world, and her 
 patience under mysterious wrongs, make her one of the 
 great Shakespearian heroines ; and the effect is pro- 
 duced by making her husband odious. 
 
 Although Shakespeare had a certain real case at the 
 Court of Elizabeth in his mind, namely, that of Lord 
 Southampton and Mistress Bess Vernon, he found it 
 inexpedient, even after an interval of years, to make 
 the part of Bertram quite plain. One mystification is 
 introduced at the outset, which is deep enough to put 
 one on a wrong scent. It is the famous oracle spoken 
 by Helena to Parolles concerning Bertram's going to 
 
 Court : 
 
 There shall your master have a thousand loves, 
 A mother and a mistress and a friend, 
 A phoenix, captain and an enemy, 
 A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign, 
 
 259 
 
THE QUARREL WITH SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear ; 
 
 His humble ambition proud humility ; 
 
 His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet ; 
 
 His faith his sweet disaster ; with a world 
 
 Of pretty fond adoptious Christendoms 
 
 That blinking Cupid gossips. Now shall he — 
 
 I know not what he shall. God send him well ! 
 
 The court's a learning place. 
 
 Warburton pronounced this to be a jargon of nonsense. 
 All oracles are nonsense, for the matter of that ; but 
 this must remain nonsense in every respect, if it be 
 understood of the subsequent career of Bertram, with 
 which it has nothing in common so far as the play goes. 
 It is really the oracle of the Earl of Essex, carefully 
 compacted and knit together in every part. It would 
 be presumptuous to profess knowledge of the meaning 
 of every word ; perhaps the form of the lines is too 
 antithetic for literal exactness ; but the effect of the 
 whole is a true portrait of Essex, drawn by a sympathetic 
 hand. It is plainly meant for some eminent personage 
 at Court, and it suits no one so well as Essex. The 
 phrases, "his sweet disaster," "proud humility," "jar- 
 ring concord," would alone suffice to mark the man. 
 But nothing else in the part suits Lord Essex ; he 
 married in 1590 the widow of Sir Philip Sidney, the 
 daughter of Walsingham, and although " blinking 
 Cupid" gossiped much about him after his marriage, 
 and as late as the eve of his departure for the Irish 
 campaign in 1599 (see Sidney Letters), he was never 
 really like Count Bertram in relation to his wife, nor 
 indeed in any other relation. The oracle of Essex is 
 spoken upon Bertram to confuse the identity of the 
 latter at the outset : he is Southampton in everything 
 but the oracle of his fate. 
 
 The relations between Lord Southampton and his 
 future wife, Elizabeth Vernon, one of the maids -of - 
 honour, were a matter of gossip from about the year 
 1595, when he was some two-and-twenty years old, 
 until their marriage, in most peculiar circumstances, in 
 
 260 
 
COUNT BERTRAM 
 
 August 1598. It appears to have been the circum- 
 stances of the marriage, and not the fact of the marriage 
 itself, that led to the outburst of the Queen's dis- 
 pleasure and to Southampton's banishment from Court. 
 In the beginning of the year 1598, the situation of 
 parties was curiously like that of Helena and Bertram 
 when the latter was about to leave Rousillon. It is 
 thus described in a letter to Sir Robert Sidney at 
 Flushing from his secretary, Rowland White, in London, 
 14th January 1598 : "I hear my Lord Southampton 
 goes with Mr. Secretary [Sir R. Cecil] to France, and so 
 onward on his travels ; which course of his doth ex- 
 tremely grieve his Mistress, that she passes her time 
 in weeping and lamenting " — just as the Countess of 
 RousiUon's steward overheard Helena doing, her excess 
 of grief being such that he thought proper to inform 
 his mistress. On ist February 1598, White writes 
 again : " His fair mistress doth wash her fairest face 
 with too many tears. I pray God his going away bring 
 her to no such infirmity which is, as it were, hereditary 
 to her name." Next day, 2nd February : " It is secretly 
 reported that my Lord Southampton shall be married to 
 his fair Mistress " ; but the report was premature by many 
 months. On nth February : " My Lord Southampton 
 is gone with Mr. Secretary " to Paris. 1 2th February : 
 " My Lord Southampton is gone, and hath left behind 
 him a very desolate gentlewoman, that hath almost 
 wept out her fairest eyes." 
 
 Lord Southampton remained in Paris after Sir 
 Robert Cecil's return to London. In a letter of nth 
 July, Sir Charles Davers, writing from Paris, tells 
 Cecil that he had delivered the latter's commendation 
 to my Lord Southampton. His projected visit to Italy 
 was put off for want of money ; he explains in a letter 
 to Essex that he had been in trouble with his creditors 
 before he left London in February. Some time in 
 August Mistress Vernon's situation required her to 
 leave the Court and take up her residence at the house 
 
 261 
 
THE QUARREL WITH SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 of Lord Essex, her cousin. Southampton came over 
 from Paris some time in August, married the lady in 
 secret — one letter (State Papers' Calendar, yth Sep- 
 tember) says he "solemnised the act himself" — and set 
 off again at once for Margate, accompanied by Sir 
 Thomas German (Jermyn), to cross to France. On 
 3rd September Cecil wrote to him an official letter by 
 the Queen's command, from the Court at Greenwich : 
 " Her Majesty knows that you came over very lately, 
 and returned again very contemptuously ; that you 
 have also married one of her maids-of-honour without 
 her privity, for which, with other circumstances informed 
 against you, I find her grievously offended ; and she 
 commands me to charge you expressly (all excuses set 
 apart) to repair hither to London, and advertise your 
 arrival without coming to the Court, until her pleasure 
 be known." On the same date, 3rd September, a warrant 
 charging him to return, signed by the Queen, was issued 
 to T. Edwardes. Southampton's answer, without date or 
 place, was that the letter had reached him " by post," 
 apparently after a long delay ; that he had been staying 
 " at this place " for some time, awaiting money to carry 
 him farther, "which received, will serve to bring me 
 back to England ; but till then I have no means to 
 stir from hence." The place was Paris, where his lord- 
 ship had been gambling in so reckless a fashion as to 
 draw all eyes upon him. News of this reached Sir 
 Robert Cecil in a communication on various topics in 
 French, unsigned, which he endorses " Fr. advis." The 
 
 date of it is ^^1598 (Cal. Hatfield MSS. viii. 
 
 358):- 
 
 Que votre Comte de Southampton, qui est du present dans 
 Paris, se en va de tout se ruenir, si on ne le retire de la France 
 dans peu de jours. Car il fait de partyer de 2, 3, et 4000*^ a la 
 paulone [tennis], mesmes le Marechall de Biron dans peu de 
 jours lay gaigna 3000". Un chaqu'un se moque de luy, telle- 
 ment que le Comte d'Essex faira un grand coup pour le dit 
 
 262 
 
COUNT BERTRAM 
 
 Comte de la retirer de bonne heure ; car autrement il perdra 
 tout son bien et reputation, tant en France qu'en Angleterre, 
 dont j'en suis bien marry, schachant que Monseigneur le 
 Comte I'ayme. 
 
 Southampton wrote to Lord Essex from Rouen on 
 1 6th October, asking for an interview. Other letters 
 followed, from which his movements are not altogether 
 clear. There was a warrant of the Queen out against 
 him, and he found it necessary to approach the Court 
 with secrecy, and under the protection of Essex. Cecil's 
 Paris correspondent mentions the latter as one who 
 could be of service in extricating Southampton from 
 the coil of dissipation in which he was involved.^ The 
 Countess was at Essex House, where she gave birth 
 to a daughter about the beginning of November. 
 Southampton had to undergo a short imprisonment 
 to purge his contempt, and was debarred the Court. 
 
 When the Queen charged Southampton with "return- 
 ing again very contemptuously " to Paris after his hurried 
 marriage, she was doubtless thinking of the contempt to 
 herself. But " contemptuous " is just the word that 
 one would apply to Bertram's conduct to Helena in 
 leaving her after the marriage, and deceiving her with 
 a lie about joining her in two days. After Mistress 
 Vernon had given up her place as maid-of-honour and 
 retired to Essex House to await her confinement, she is 
 
 > The facts that Lord Essex was thus actively concerned in helping 
 Southampton out of the embarrassments caused by his follies abroad, and 
 that Sir Thomas German (Jermyn) was the friend who accompanied him 
 to Paris on his return thither after the hurried wedding in August, suggest 
 a meaning for the mysterious initials G. and E. which always follow "First 
 French Lord," or " Captain," and " Second French Lord," or " Captain," 
 in the stage-dirpctions of ' All's Well that Ends Well ' as printed in the 
 folio. It has been conjectured that they are the initials of the actors, E. 
 being for Ecclestone. But the list of actors in the folio is for the whole of 
 the plays, and for no particular one ; so that the conjecture is extremely 
 vague. It is more reasonable to suppose that the letters in this one instance 
 were used to distinguish to the author, as he wrote, the two real persons 
 whom he figured as the companions, monitors, and sometimes free critics 
 of Bertram. They have important parts, but are not named nor specially 
 enumerated among the dramatis persona : hence the greater need of some 
 private mark in the dialogue. 
 
 263 
 
THE QUARREL WITH SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 reported to have expressed her confidence that Lord 
 Southampton would return " to justify her," which he 
 did either just before or just after the child was born. 
 His conduct to her from first to last, as we see it in 
 the Sidney Letters about the date of his departure for 
 France, and in the newly-printed Cecil Letters for later 
 dates in the same year, is curiously like that of Bertram 
 in the play, and is most like it just in those particulars 
 wherein Shakespeare has departed from the story in 
 Boccaccio's original to suit some private intention. 
 Bertram is the character who gave occasion to the 
 famous aphorism : 
 
 The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together ; 
 our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not ; and 
 our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our 
 virtues. 
 
 On the other hand, Dr. Johnson says: "I cannot 
 reconcile my heart to Bertram, a man noble without 
 generosity, and young without truth ; who marries 
 Helen as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate ; 
 when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a 
 second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has 
 wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed 
 to happiness." 
 
 The moralists are agreed that this is one of the plays 
 in which Shakespeare has violated poetic justice. But, 
 in the first place, his ethics are always empirical: in 
 which respect he is not different from the mass of his 
 countrymen. And secondly, he was dealing with real 
 persons, and with real circumstances which he knew 
 intimately. The name chosen for the comedy, 'All's 
 Well that Ends Well,' appears to have been warranted 
 literally by Lord and Lady Southampton's married life. 
 If the author had contrived his plot so as to punish 
 Bertram he would have gratified the moral prejudices of 
 Dr. Johnson, and at the same time gratified his own, on 
 the supposition that he had any. But, in the personal 
 hypothesis, this play is the best possible evidence that 
 
 264 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MOTIVE 
 
 he bore no malice ; whoever reads it closely and weighs 
 it well will admit that it obeys the rule of "nothing 
 extenuate, nor set down aught in malice." None the 
 less, he would hardly have chosen the subject at all had 
 he not been looking at the character of Southampton 
 coldly and from a distance. 
 
 Antonio's usurpation in ' The Tempest ' is described 
 as instigated by ambition and effected by treachery. 
 The real occasion of Southampton's hostility was un- 
 doubtedly Shakespeare's assertion of his independence, 
 and of his share in the plays as not only the preponder- 
 ant one, but the only authorship worth mentioning. If 
 it should seem to us surprising that a young nobleman, 
 with so many other openings and means of gratification, 
 should have resented that, we are allowed to see what 
 may be called the psychological motive, which makes 
 the matter more intelligible. It is not unlike Drayton's 
 explanation of the patron Olcon hating him whom lately 
 he did love, as " the humour in the blood " did move. 
 Prospero describes the rise of enmity as follows : 
 
 I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated 
 To closeness and the bettering of my mind, 
 With that which, but by being so retired, 
 O'er-prized all popular rate, in my false brother 
 Awaked an evil nature ; and my trust. 
 Like a good parent, did beget of him 
 A falsehood in its contrary as great 
 As my trust was ; which had indeed no limit, 
 A confidence sans bound. 
 
 But there is an earlier and much more animated 
 account of this strange inversion of feeling, in a play 
 which is otherwise so pleasing an idyll that we are apt 
 to overlook the tragic note in it, namely, ' As You Like 
 It.' This was the first opportunity that Shakespeare 
 had of embodying in dramatic form his own deep sense 
 of wrong and injustice after the events of the year 1 599, 
 the play having been produced, it is supposed, at the 
 new Globe Theatre on the Bankside in 1600, and being 
 
 265 
 
THE QUARREL WITH SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 the only one that can be probably assigned to that year. 
 Orlando, the outcast in the forest of Arden, is the first 
 sketch of Prospero, the exile on an island ; and as the 
 one is the author himself, so is the other. It will be 
 found that his view of his own position at the time is 
 an important complement to his view of it on looking 
 back, and that he has really given a part of the story 
 of his life under the parable of Orlando.^ 
 
 Orlando 
 
 In taking the story from Lodge's Rosalynd (1590), 
 he adhered so closely to his original that he was not im- 
 probably judged to have infringed the copyright of 
 Lodge's prose romance ; at all events, when ' As You 
 Like It ' was entered for copyright on the 4th of August 
 1600, along with 'Henry V.' and 'Much Ado about 
 Nothing,' all three were ordered "to be staled " ; and 
 whereas copyright was granted to the two others on 
 the 14th and 23rd of the same month, ' As You Like It ' 
 is not heard of again until it appears in the folio of 
 1623, being one of the sixteen plays which were copy- 
 righted for the first time at that date. Apart from 
 changes in the names of the characters, he followed 
 Lodge's well-told tale with as much closeness as was 
 usual with him in taking a plot from Holinshed or 
 Plutarch, or from some Italian collection. But he 
 departed from his original in two or three points, 
 apparently insignificant, and yet of vital importance to 
 his private purpose. Lodge makes the king (who 
 becomes the duke) to embrace the wrestler after his 
 victory, and the peers to " entreat him with all favour- 
 able courtesy." But, in the play, the duke is hostile to 
 Orlando after his victory, because he was his father's 
 son ; and this change is the more noticeable that it is 
 
 ' ' As You Like It ' is one of the plays in which the author has been 
 suspected of introducing himself, but strangely enough it is with Jaques 
 that he has been identified. 
 
 266 
 
ORLANDO AND OLIVER 
 
 a motive only, nothing turning upon it in the subsequent 
 
 action. When Orlando returns to his brother Oliver, 
 
 the occasion arises for developing a much more elaborate 
 
 motive, of exactly the same kind, of which there is hardly 
 
 even a hint in the original : the returning wrestler finds 
 
 merely the door shut against him. Orlando finds 
 
 his brother filled with an animosity greater than his 
 
 sovereign's : 
 
 Thus must I from the smoke into the smother, 
 From tyrant duke unto a tyrant brother. 
 
 It is the old domestic, Adam, who meets him outside the 
 house and warns him of the reception that awaits him, 
 of which Orlando appears to have had no suspicion : 
 
 Why should you be so fond to overcome 
 
 The bonny priser of the humorous duke ? 
 
 Your praise is come too swiftly home before you. 
 
 Know you not, master, to some kind of men 
 
 Their graces serve them but as enemies ? 
 
 No more do yours ; your virtues, gentle master, 
 
 Are sanctified and holy traitors to you. 
 
 O, what a world is this, when what is comely 
 
 Envenoms him that bears it ! 
 
 Orl. Why, what's the matter ? 
 
 Adam. O, unhappy youth ! 
 
 Come not within these- doors ; within this roof 
 The enemy of all your graces lives : 
 Your brother — no, no brother ; yet the son — 
 Yet not the son, I will not call him son 
 Of him I was about to call his father — 
 Hath heard your praises, and this night he means 
 To burn the lodging where you use to lie. 
 And you within it : if he fail of that. 
 He will have other means to cut you off. 
 
 The similarity of this to Antonio's dislike of Prospero 
 is very close. The same notion of the old domestic, 
 that the elder brother was no worthy son of his father, 
 is found in Miranda's answer to Prospero's question, 
 " then tell me if this might be a brother .? " : 
 
 Mir. I should sin 
 
 To think but nobly of my grandmother : 
 Good wombs have borne bad sons. 
 267 
 
THE QUARREL WITH SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 Steevens, with no theory of Orlando as meant 
 throughout for the author himself, was somehow led to 
 think that two lines in the brother's own confession of 
 his hatred of Orlando in the following passage were 
 descriptive of "Shakespeare himself" (marginal MS. 
 note cited by Dr. Aldis Wright from Steevens's copy 
 of the 4th folio) : " Yet he's gentle, never schooled and 
 yet learned, full of noble device, of all sorts enchantingly 
 beloved." But the whole soliloquy of Oliver, which is 
 the same in substance as Adam's warning to Orlando, is 
 an exact anticipation, in 1600, of Antonio's inversion of 
 feeling towards his brother Prospero, as for example : 
 
 For my soul, yet I know not why, hates nothing more than he. 
 Yet he's gentle, never schooled and yet learned, full of noble device, 
 of all sorts enchantingly beloved, and indeed so much in the heart 
 of the world, and especially of my own people, who best know him, 
 that I am altogether misprised. 
 
 The last idea is not in ' The Tempest ' ; but all the 
 rest is, especially the love of the people for Prospero : 
 
 Mir. Wherefore did they not 
 
 That hour destroy us ? 
 
 Pros. Well demanded, wench : 
 
 My tale provokes that question. Dear, they durst not. 
 So dear the love my people bore me, nor set 
 A mark so bloody on the business. 
 
 Lastly, as it is the honest old counsellor Gonzalo who 
 befriends Prospero in executing the order for his exile, 
 so it is honest old Le Beau (Fulke Greville again) 
 who takes upon him the part of a friend when he is sent 
 officially to dismiss Orlando : 
 
 Le Beau. Good sir, I do in friendship counsel you 
 To leave this place. Albeit you have deserved 
 High commendation, true applause and love. 
 Yet such is now the duke's condition 
 That he misconstrues all that you have done. 
 The duke is humorous : what he is indeed. 
 More suits you to conceive than I to speak of. 
 
 The duke, who is made to be " humorous " contrary to 
 
 268 
 
ELIZABETH AND SHAKESPEARE 
 
 the original story, and therefore to serve some private 
 purpose of the author, is the imperious Elizabeth ; and 
 this passage, I feel sure, is an important one in Shake- 
 speare's story of his life. It is probable, on every ground, 
 that the Queen interested herself directly in the question 
 of the new Laureate in 1599. It was at her instance 
 that the Poet's Pension had been given to Spenser eight 
 years before, according to the well-authenticated tradi- 
 tion, which Landor has based upon in his imaginary 
 conversation between Elizabeth and Burleigh. She must 
 have known Shakespeare quite well by sight, through his 
 frequent appearances on the private stages of the Court, 
 from as early a date as Christmas 1594, when he pro- 
 vided a play along with Burbage and Kemp at Green- 
 wich Palace. There is also every reason to believe the 
 story, that the Queen asked him to exhibit FalstafF " in 
 love," a hard task which he accomplished with so 
 brilliant ingenuity and wit in 'The Merry Wives of 
 Windsor,' that her Majesty must have recognised the 
 superiority of his genius as well as she knew his face. 
 I suspect that the author himself played FalstafF, both 
 by reason of some of the dialogue with Mrs. Ford 
 (probably played originally by an amateur lady of the 
 Court), and of the references to himself as a player in 
 the iioth Sonnet. By making himself "a motley to 
 the view," and that too in the part of a " beast in love " 
 (which is the idea implied by contrast with the " god in 
 love to whom I am [now] confined"), he must have 
 made it all the more difficult for the Queen to reconcile 
 herself to the thought of him as her laureate poet.^ 
 
 1 Compare the epigram "To our English Terence, Mr. Will. Shake- 
 speare," by John Davies (of Hereford), No. 159 of his Scourge of Folly, 
 1610 : 
 
 Some say, good Will, which I in sport do sing, 
 Hadst thou not played some Icingly parts in sport. 
 Thou hadst been a companion for a Icing, 
 And been a King among the meaner sort. 
 Some others rail, but rail as they think iit. 
 Thou hast no railing but a reigning wit. 
 
 And honesty thou sow'st which they do reap, 
 
 So to increase their stock which they do keep. 
 
 269 
 
THE QUARREL WITH SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 There is, however, a more probable reason why the 
 Queen should have been "humorous." In 'Twelfth 
 Night,' which was his next comedy, if not his next 
 play of any kind, after ' As You Like It,' the part of 
 Signior Fabian may be taken to be meant for the author 
 of the piece ; for at the end Fabian assumes the chief 
 responsibility for the practical joke upon Malvolio, and 
 begs that it 
 
 May rather pluck on laughter than revenge. 
 
 It appears that Fabian had been previously " brought 
 out of favour with my lady about a bear-baiting here " : 
 which must have been of the same kind as the ensuing 
 baiting of Malvolio, for Sir Toby, referring to that, says : 
 " We'll have the bear again." The original bear-baiting 
 which brought him out of favour with my lady was, 
 doubdess, the baiting of Sir Thomas Lucy as Justice 
 Shallow in ' The Second Part of Henry IV.,' acted about 
 1598-99. The introduction of Shallow is a mistake 
 from every point of view : it is the least successful part 
 of the Falstaffian humour, it is a gross caricature of 
 Lucy, and it provoked remonstrances even from the 
 author's friends, if I am right in my reading of the i loth 
 Sonnet, beginning, " Alas, 'tis true." Shakespeare saw 
 his mistake after the publication of ' 2 Henry IV.' in 
 the autumn of 1600 (a few weeks after Lucy's death) ; 
 so far so, that in printing 'The Merry Wives of 
 Windsor ' (which was the earlier play of the two) some 
 two years after (in 1602), he omitted nearly all that 
 relates to Shallow, including the means of identifying 
 him with Lucy by his armorial bearings which we now 
 have in the folio text. The Queen must have been 
 moved by some consideration apart from literary merit, 
 apart also from the jealousy of other poets, and of 
 course apart from the private grudge of Lord South- 
 ampton (if she had known that he was behind Lord 
 Herbert), before she withheld the laurel from Shake- 
 speare. Elizabeth was "humorous," and as Le Beau 
 
 270 
 
A ROWLAND FOR AN OLIVER 
 
 (Fulke Greville) told Orlando, "it more suits you to 
 conceive than I to speak of" what she was. 
 
 The names of Orlando and Oliver are borrowed 
 from the saying "a Rowland for an Oliver " ; and that 
 is the manly self-reliant spirit of the hero. Orlando, 
 the victorious wrestler, is the same person as Prospero, 
 the potent magician. In the next twelve years he had 
 become prosperous, whence the later name : Fortune 
 was " now my dear lady." He is a prince in bearing, 
 assured of his rightful sovereignty, commanding the 
 respect of the other princes as soon as he reveals himself 
 to their purged eyesight. 
 
 In one sense the quarrel with Southampton was the 
 common case of the quarrel of a poet with his patron. 
 But in this instance the poet was not an ordinary genius, 
 inasmuch as he was an excellent man of business, who 
 profited, as is commonly believed, by his patron's 
 money, if he did not profit also by his brains. In the 
 parable of Prospero and Antonio, there is hardly a hint 
 that there was another side of the account ; if we could 
 hear Lord Southampton's view of the case, we should 
 probably discover that he attached some value to his 
 share in the collaboration, and that, while he desired to 
 be himself anonymous, he was aggrieved that the plays 
 in question should pass under his collaborator's name. 
 This would have been to take Shakespeare at his 
 unguarded word of 1594: "What I have to do is 
 yours." 
 
 271 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST ' : SECOND 
 SERIES 
 
 Among Prospero's enemies are included Stephano, the 
 drunken butler pf the King of Naples, and Trinculo, a 
 jester, " pied ninny," or " patch," who is also of the 
 king's company. In order to make their enmity on the 
 island actual, they conspire with Caliban to take the life 
 of Prospero : in which plot Stephano is chief, Trinculo 
 an assenting party. Of the nine scenes in the play, 
 three are devoted in great part to this group of 
 "enemies" (especially included as such by Act IV. 
 265), who furnish the comic element. The fun 
 develops naturally enough, and can be enjoyed after 
 a fashion without knowing what it all meant in the 
 author's mind. But in all three comic scenes the best 
 of the wit, as well as of the fun, is lost without a key ; 
 while the last of them, the stealing of glistering apparel 
 which had been hung upon a clothes-line, has no plain 
 meaning at all, as I suppose most readers will confess. 
 
 Trinculo 
 
 The key to the comic scenes is the identity of 
 Stephano with Ben Jonson and of Trinculo with John 
 Marston. As the scenes develop, it is Marston who is 
 identified first. Trinculo enters as a storm is brewing, 
 and finds Caliban lying flat on the ground ; he creeps 
 under the monster's gaberdine for shelter. To them 
 
 272 
 
JOHN MARSTON 
 
 enters Stephano singing: a bottle in his hand. The 
 monster, he remarks, has four legs : presently he finds 
 that it has two voices, one of which calls him by his 
 name, " Stephano," and declares, 
 
 I am Trinculo — be not afeared — thy good friend Trinculo. 
 Steph. If thou beest Trinculo, come forth : I'll pull thee by 
 the lesser legs ; if any be Trinculo' s legs, these are they. 
 
 This identifies Trinculo with Marston ; it was probably 
 meant to identify him, and probably did identify him at 
 the time. It is the old jest about Marston's "little 
 legs," which Ben Jonson made great play with in his 
 Poetaster (1601), and an anonymous author in Jack 
 Drum's Entertainment ( 1 600). Jonson told Drummond 
 that " he had many quarrells with Marston, beat him and 
 took his pistol from him, wrote his Poetaster on him : 
 the beginning of them were that Marston represented 
 him on the stage in his youth given to venerie." The 
 representation on the stage here alluded to does not 
 correspond with anything that is known, and it is 
 probable (antecedently as well) that Drummond had 
 taken it up wrong. But the play just mentioned 
 {Jack Drum, etc.), which is supposed by R. Simpson to 
 be Marston's, does contain a not less scandalous repre- 
 sentation of Ben Jonson, for which it is quite credible 
 that he gave the author a beating. In it the part of 
 Brabant senior corresponds with Ben in every respect, 
 Brabant junior being Marston, who is thus referred to : 
 
 Winif. Indeed young Brabant is a proper man. 
 And yet his legs are somewhat of the least. 
 
 In The Poetaster he is thus introduced: "That's he 
 in the embroidered hat, there, with the ash-coloured 
 feather ; his name is Laberius Crispinus." In Dekker's 
 GuWs Hornbook (1609) a gallant at the play is advised 
 that he cannot better revenge himself upon a libellous 
 playwright than by rising with a screwed and discon- 
 tented face and walking out in the middle of one of his 
 scenes — "if the writer be a fellow that hath either 
 
 273 T 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 epigrammed you, or hath had a flirt at your mistress, 
 or hath brought either your feather, or your red beard, 
 or your little legs, etc., on the stage," The Poetaster, 
 having described Marston's (Crispinus') feather, next 
 leads up to his little legs by the following dialogue 
 upon Crispinus' cousin : 
 
 Chke. She is a gentlewoman. 
 
 Crispinus. Or else she should not be my cousin, I assure you. 
 
 Chloe. Are you a gentleman ? 
 
 Crispinus. That I am, lady ; you shall see mine arms, if you 
 please. 
 
 Chloe. No, your legs do sufficiently show you are a gentleman 
 born,,sir ; for a man borne upon little legs is always a gentleman 
 born. 
 
 Therefore when Stephano says of the " lesser legs " of 
 the monster : " If any be Trinculo's legs, these are 
 they," it is the old joke about Marston's little legs. 
 This physical peculiarity of the satirist is not known 
 upon what might be called biographical evidence ; but 
 constructively it is as certain as if we had the measure- 
 ments. Another point arises from his answer to 
 Stephano : " I am Trinculo — thy good friend Trinculo." 
 This is Marston dedicating the 1604 edition of his 
 Malcontent to Ben Jonson, amico suo candido et cordato — 
 after Ben had quarrelled with him (once or oftener), 
 beaten him, and taken his pistol from him ! Stephano 
 beats Trinculo in the next scene ; which may be either 
 the original beating or a later unrecorded one. 
 
 The coined name of Trinculo conceals a good deal 
 of wit, depending in part upon his identification with 
 Marston. It is a metathesis of Ventriloc (Tr[e]incvlo), 
 and its appropriateness lies in the fact that Ariel, 
 invisible, ventriloquises through Trinculo, making him 
 give the lie most persistently — twice to Caliban and 
 the third time to Stephano, who becomes enraged at this 
 apparent contumacy and beats him.^ The intention of 
 
 1 The part of Ariel must have been written for a boy who could 
 ventriloquise. His gift is used not merely in the comic scene where the 
 voice seems to come from Trinculo, but also in the two songs by which 
 
 274 
 
MEANING OF 'TRINCULO' 
 
 ventriloquising through Trinculo is foreshadowed In the 
 previous Act, where Stephano, finding him under the 
 gaberdine at Caliban's hind quarters, asks, "How 
 earnest thou to be the siege of this mooncalf? Can 
 he vent-Trinculos?" — a grossness which would not 
 have been there but for the pun in it. 
 
 Shakespeare found the word ventriloques in Rabelais 
 {Pantag. iv. 58), in a passage where it is implied 
 that the voice which issued from the ancient oracles 
 was ventriloquism, on the evidence of Plutarch, De 
 cessatione orac. antiq., and Hippocrates, Lib. epidem. 
 He had been getting up the subject of the ancient 
 oracles for the purpose of ' Winter's Tale ' shortly 
 before. But how did he come to associate ventriloquism 
 with Ariel ? This is the most curious of these associa- 
 tions of ideas. It goes as far back as one of the 
 greatest of the sonnets, the famous 146th (in which 
 the obvious misprint of the second line is here 
 corrected) ^ : 
 
 Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, 
 
 — My sins these rebel powers that thee array. 
 
 This is the scriptural idea in the 29th of Isaiah, begin- 
 ning, " Woe to Ariel ! to Ariel. . . . And I will camp 
 against thee round about, and will lay siege against thee 
 with a mount, and I will raise forts against thee." The 
 
 Ferdinand was perplexed, the burthen of the one, the watch-dog's bark 
 "Bow-wow," and of the other, the sound of beUs "Ding-dong," coming 
 " dispersedly," that is, in the same voice from more than one quarter. 
 1 The lines in the original text of 1 609 read : 
 
 Poore soule the center of my sinful! earth, 
 
 My sinful! earth these rebell powres that thee array. 
 
 Malone's note is : " It is manifest that the compositor inadvertently 
 repeated the last three words of the first verse in the beginning of the 
 second, omitting two syllables, which are sufficient to complete the metre. 
 What the omitted words were it is impossible now to determine." It is 
 not only not impossible, but very easy, by following the automatic train of 
 the compositor's mistake : he found " my sins " beginning the second verse, 
 while " my sinful earth " had ended the first, and the recurrence of the 
 same letters as far as " my sin- " led him to repeat the whole of the former 
 phrase. The only surprising thing is that it has remained uncorrected to 
 the present hour. 
 
 275 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 suggestion for the sonnet comes, however, much more 
 directly from the Latin of the Vulgate : " Vae Ariel, 
 Ariel . . . Et circumvallabo Ariel . . . Et circumdabo 
 quasi sphaeram in circuito tuo, et faciam contra te 
 aggerem, et munimenta ponam in obsidionem tuam." 
 This is Ariel, the " poor soul " of the sonnet. But the 
 suggestion of Ariel in ' The Tempest ' is not only the 
 Ariel of the three first verses of this chapter, but also 
 of the fourth : " And thou shalt be brought down, and 
 shalt speak out of the ground, and thy speech shall be 
 low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be as of one 
 that hath a familiar spirit out of the ground, and thy 
 speech shall whisper out of the dust." Or, better in 
 the Vulgate : " De terra loquerls, et de humo audietur 
 eloquium tuum, et erit quasi pythonis de terra vox tua, 
 et de humo eloquium tuum musitabit." St. Jerome 
 had used the pagan term python which, with its feminine 
 pyihonissa, was the technical name of the invisible 
 oracle ; Rabelais had supplied the (rationalistic) sugges- 
 tion of ventriloquism for the python ; and Shakespeare 
 had taken Ariel in either sense just as he required 
 him, uniting in him " an airy spirit " who could do 
 Prospero's errands and ventriloquise when needed, 
 and Prospero's proper soul. 
 
 The humour of making the invisible Ariel ventrilo- 
 quise through Trinculo (who gets a beating in con- 
 sequence) is farther explained by identifying the latter 
 with Marston. Ben Jonson wrote his comedy The 
 Poetaster specially upon Marston (as he told Drummond), 
 and that was at a time when the latter had taken sides 
 with Shakespeare's sympathisers. The answer to it was 
 Dekker's Satiromastix, in which Dekker himself is the 
 same Demetrius as In Jonson's play, Marston the same 
 Crispinus, Jonson the same Horace, and Shakespeare 
 an historical anachronism. King William Rufus (a joke 
 upon his tawny hair). Marston, or Crispinus, being for 
 the moment on Shakespeare's side, is made to speak for 
 the latter in the matter of the Laurel Crown. Referring 
 
 276 
 
BEN JONSON 
 
 to Horace, " a dreadful poet taking his degree," King 
 William Rufus speaks from his throne thus : 
 
 But in what mould soe'er this man be cast, 
 We make him thine, Crispinus : wit and judgment 
 Shine in thy numbers ! And thy soul, I know, 
 Will not go armed in passion 'gainst the foe. 
 Therefore be thou ourself: whilst ourself sit 
 But as spectator of this scene of wit. 
 
 (Prospero looks on while Trinculo is made to utter 
 Ariel's voice.) Horace is then dragged in, along with 
 another poet Asinius Bubo (probably Sir John Davies, 
 whom the Queen had made one of her servants in 
 ordinary for his poetic merit), and both are crowned 
 with nettles because they had written stinging epigrams. 
 
 The Drunken Butler 
 
 The identity of Stephano with Ben Jonson is as 
 difficult to prove analytically as it is self-evident in 
 relation to other parts and to the whole design ; but 
 some enumeration of the several points in the evidence 
 will be expected. He is a drunken butler in the 
 service of the King of Naples. Drummond, in his 
 notes of conversations with Jonson, says that Lord 
 Pembroke used to send Jonson twenty pounds (more 
 than a hundred of our money) every New Year's day, 
 to buy books with, that " drink is one of the elements 
 in which he liveth," and that " several times he devoured 
 all his books for necessity." Some of Jonson's physical 
 peculiarities are brought into the play. Thus, " and it 
 shall be said so again while Stephano breathes at 
 nostrils " — this is " he sounds it so in the nose " of 
 Satiromastix, from which source we learn also that his 
 face was " like a rotten russet apple when 'tis bruised." 
 Stephano's manner of " trolling the catch " is cognate 
 with " sounds it so in the nose " and " breathes at 
 nostrils." The matter of his songs is equally 
 appropriate : 
 
 277 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 Flout 'em, and cout 'em ; 
 And slcowt 'em and flout 'em. 
 Thought is free ; 
 
 — that is exactly Jonson's attitude to his contemporaries. 
 It is Drummond's character of him : " He is a great 
 lover of himself ; a contemner and scorner of others ; 
 given rather to lose a friend than a jest " (Jonson's own 
 saying about Horace (himself), put into the mouth of 
 Captain Tucca in The Poetaster). It is also the 
 common grievance against him in the play Jack Drum's 
 Entertainment. At the close, the crest-fallen Brabant is 
 thus addressed by Planet (who has been identified with 
 Shakespeare) : 
 
 Why should'st thou take felicitie to gull 
 Good honest souls ? And in thy arrogance 
 And glorious ostentation of thy wit 
 Think God infused all perfection 
 Into thy soul alone, and made the rest 
 For thee to laugh at ? Now, you Censurer, 
 Be the ridicluous subject of our mirth. 
 
 Stephano's famous sailor-song has more in it than 
 meets the ear : 
 
 The master, the swabber, the boatswain and I, 
 The gunner and his mate 
 
 Loved Mall, Meg and Marian and Margery, 
 But none of us cared for Kate : 
 For she had a tongue with a tang, etc. 
 
 Jonson's relations with women must have become 
 notorious through his own boastful talk ; thus he told 
 Drummond several queer stories about thetn, adding 
 that his own wife was a shrew, and that he had not 
 bedded with her for five years. She was doubtless the 
 Kate that " none of us cared for." There was only one 
 Kate in those days, " curst Kate," " saucy Kate," Kate 
 the shrewj of the old play ' The Taming of a Shrew,' 
 and of Shakespeare's adaptation. The whole meaning of 
 Mall, Meg, Marian, and Margery, and their respective 
 
 278 
 
BEN JONSON 
 
 lovers, will always be past finding out. Mall was 
 the name of the wife of Brabant senior (Jonson) in 
 Jack Brum, who, not doubting of her chastity, intro- 
 duces her to a Frenchman by way of a joke, not as his 
 wife, but as a young woman of easy virtue — and dis- 
 covers that his confidence in her had been misplaced. 
 That was probably the representation of Jonson on the 
 stage, by Marston, to which Drummond alludes. 
 " This is a scurvy tune," says Stephano, " but here's my 
 comfort" (Drinks). 
 
 Lasdy, Caliban asks Stephano : 
 
 CaL Hast thou dropp'd from heaven ? 
 
 StepL Out o' the moon, I do assure thee : I was the Man i' 
 the Moon when time was. 
 
 Ca/. I have seen thee in her, and I do adore thee. 
 My mistress show'd me thee and thy dog and thy bush. 
 
 The Man in the Moon is the title of a poem by Drayton, 
 by which nothing more is meant than that there is a man 
 with a lanthorn who pries into all that is going on in 
 the dark corners of the world. But it appears to have 
 had also a political meaning, derived perhaps from 
 Elizabeth as Cynthia, or the Moon. Thus, in another 
 part of ' The Tempest,' there is an enigmatic remark, 
 " The Man in the Moon's too slow," where the succession 
 to the crown is in question, the meaning perhaps being 
 that Cecil and the other ministers of Elizabeth had 
 failed to the last in their attempts to learn the mind of 
 the Queen. But whatever the phrase meant colloquially, 
 it is applied elsewhere to Ben Jonson, namely, as Horace 
 in Satiromastix. Captain Tucca says to him : " My 
 long-heeled Troglodyte, I could make thine ears burn 
 now by dropping into them all those hot oaths to which 
 thyself gavest voluntary fire (when thou wast the Man 
 in the Moon), that thou would'st never squib out any 
 new saltpetre jests against honest Tucca. . . . Yet thou 
 know'st thou hast broke those oaths in print." Dekker 
 gives in his preface the name of the real person whom 
 Jonson had satirised as Captain Tucca. He is said to 
 
 279 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 have been the same whom he had previously satirised as 
 Captain Bobadil in Every Man in His Humour (1598) ; 
 so that Tucca's remonstrance, in the passage cited, may 
 mean that Jonson had promised, when he was the Man 
 in the Moon, not to do it again, but had broken his 
 word by presenting the same character under a new 
 name. After Every Man in His Humour, Jonson had 
 been invited to Court ; which is perhaps the time " when 
 thou wast the Man in the Moon," and the meaning ot 
 his answer to Caliban : "I was the Man in the Moon 
 when time was." ^ 
 
 The identity of Stephano hangs together with the 
 identity of Trinculo. If the latter be Marston, for 
 independent reasons given, the former should be Jonson ; 
 for the beating that Jonson gave Marston is historical, 
 and it is the same incident that helps to identify the 
 same pair as Ajax and Thersites in ' Troilus and Cressida.' 
 
 But it is in the last of the three scenes with Stephano 
 and Trinculo, the scene with the clothes-line hung 
 across the stage, that the probable evidence rises so 
 high as to become sufficient for certainty. The whole 
 business of the clothes-line is unintelligible without 
 Trinculo's key to it, the word " frippery," or old-clothes 
 shop, carrying us back to Ben Jonson's epigram of ten 
 or eleven years before, " Poet Ape," In which he accused 
 Shakespeare of filching so freely from his contemporaries 
 that his " works are e'en the frippery of wit " — the old- 
 clothes shop of wit. 
 
 1 There is probably a more subtle reference in the Man in the Moon 
 " with thy dog and thy bush." The man in the moon carries a faggot on 
 his back, which, according to Chaucer, must have been stolen. Douce 
 (illustrations, p. lo, edition of 1839) thinks so, quoting from the Testament 
 ofCreseid the following description of the moon : 
 
 On her breast a chorle painted ful even, 
 
 Bearing a bush of thorns on his backe, 
 
 Which for his theft might clime no ner the heven. 
 
 Perhaps the suggestion is, that Bobadil was an imitation of FalstafF, who 
 was certainly in existence before him on the stage, the name having been 
 already changed from Oldcastle before the first edition of ' Henry IV.' in 
 1598. 
 
 280 
 
BEN JONSON 
 
 Shakespeare deferred his revenge until 'The 
 Tempest,' and then repaid the author of " Poet Ape " 
 with compound interest. That is the real reason why 
 the drunken butler of the King of Naples is one of 
 Prospero's " enemies," and why he was providentially 
 on board the ship, so as to be delivered into Prospero's 
 power. In the first scene, before Stephano has met 
 with Caliban and joined in the conspiracy, Prospero is 
 aware that 
 
 By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune, 
 Now my dear lady, hath mine enemies 
 Brought to this shore. 
 
 The drunken butler and the jester, although always 
 kept in a separate class, were two of the five " enemies " 
 in the original design. We may take it that Marston 
 was made an enemy rather as the complement and foil 
 to Jonson than on his own account, just as Essex is 
 included in the other group on account of his relations 
 with Southampton. Jonson is the arch-enemy among 
 the poets ; and the grand cause of enmity is his 
 epigram " Poet Ape," in which he charged Shakespeare 
 with plagiarism in the most formal and circumstantial 
 terms. 
 
 The date of this epigram, which appeared first in 
 print, so far as one knows, in Jonson's folio of 1 6 1 6, is 
 about the year 1 600. It is referred to in the prologue 
 to The Poetaster (1601), and in several passages of 
 Satiromastix, which was the immediate answer to that 
 play from the Shakespearian side. It was almost 
 certainly the "vulgar scandal" of Sonnet 112, the date 
 of which would be the winter of 1 600-1 601 : 
 
 Your love and pity doth th' impression fill 
 Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon my brow ; 
 For what care I who calls me well or ill 
 So you o'er-green my bad, my good allow ? 
 
 In that formal arraignment, Jonson would have been 
 the spokesman of a considerable party. Whether or 
 
 281 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 not he acted in conjunction with Lord Southampton, 
 he was dealing with the same matter that had been the 
 ground of his lordship's quarrel with his poet ; and it 
 can hardly be doubted that it was the accusation of 
 plagiarism, from one side and the other, that really 
 kept him out of the Laurel Crown. It had been 
 brought against him as early as 1592 by Robert Greene, 
 who called him " an upstart crow beautified with our 
 feathers," It is always a serious charge, to which the 
 genius of the accused is no sufficient answer, witness the 
 ever-recurring debate over it in the case of Handel. 
 The falcon is a bird of prey, against whom the smaller 
 fowl make common cause. Shakespeare would seem to 
 have had an uneasy conscience about it : " So you o'er- 
 green my bad, my good allow " — hang an ivy bush over 
 the wine-shop door, according to the proverb. The 
 immediate occasion of Ben Jonson's onslaught was 
 probably 'As You Like It' (1600), the plot of which 
 makes free use of the original and distinguished prose 
 romance Rosalynd, written by Lodge in 1590 on a 
 voyage to and from the Azores. 
 
 If Shakespeare had sometimes an uneasy conscience 
 over his plagiarisms, he had also a very definite and, we 
 shall now think, a not unjust view of the uses of 
 " economy " in playwright's work. He has expressed 
 both the reason and the ethics of it in the following 
 incomparably witty lines of the 59th Sonnet : 
 
 If there be nothing new but that which is, 
 Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled 
 Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss 
 The second burthen of a former child ! 
 
 After that, it is easy to see how incompatible was the 
 temper, how unsympathetic the judgment, of Ben 
 Jonson, in his epigram ' Poet Ape,' which we may 
 assume to have been written under a sense of duty. 
 
 282 
 
JONSON ON SHAKESPEARE 
 
 POET APE 
 
 Poor Poet Ape, that should be thought our chief, 
 
 Whose works are e'en the frippery of wit. 
 
 From brokage is become so bold a thief 
 
 As we, the robb'd, leave rage and pity it. 
 
 At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean. 
 
 Buy the reversion of old plays : now grown 
 
 To a little wealth and credit in the scene, 
 
 He takes up all, makes each man's wit his own : 
 
 And, told of this, he slights it : " Tut, such crimes 
 
 The sluggish gaping auditor devours ; 
 
 He marks not whose 'twas first ; and after-times 
 
 May judge it to be his, as well as ours." 
 
 Fool ! as if half-eyes will not know a fleece 
 
 From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole piece ! 
 
 The language is studiously offensive. Jonson printed it 
 in his folio of 1616 amongst the other epigrams in his 
 Book of Epigrams, which part of the folio was dedicated 
 to Lord Pembroke, as "the ripest of my studies." 
 None of the epigrams is more carefully constructed than 
 " Poet Ape," and it rises naturally to the mind after 
 reading the following dedication, with its obvious hit 
 at Shakespeare's dedication (by Thorpe) of his Sonnets 
 to Mr. W. H. : "My Lord — While you cannot change 
 your merit, I dare not change your title : it was that 
 made it, and not L Under which name I here offer 
 to your lordship the ripest of my studies, my Epigrams ; 
 which though they carry danger in the sound, do not 
 therefore seek your shelter ; for when I made them I 
 had nothing in my conscience to expressing of which I 
 did need a cypher." The animus against Shakespeare, 
 and inability to understand his wit, are as great as ever. 
 No one understood Jonson better than Shakespeare 
 himself ; his character of him as Ajax in ' Troilus and 
 Cressida ' is not only witty, but also not unfair, accord- 
 ing to other evidence : " valiant as the lion, churlish as 
 the bear, slow as the elephant ; a man into whom 
 nature hath so crowded humours that his valour is 
 crushed into folly, his folly sauced with discretion ; 
 
 283 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST* 
 
 there is no man hath a virtue that he hath not a glimpse 
 of, nor any man an attaint but he carries some stain 
 of it." Drummond, after entertaining him three weeks 
 at Hawthornden in January 1619, wrote of him : "He 
 is passionately kind and angry ; careless either to gain 
 or keep ; vindictive, but, if he be well answered, 
 [vindictive] against himself." If he did not altogether 
 relish the answer which he got in ' The Tempest,' he 
 cannot but have been lost in admiration of its extra- 
 ordinary gusto and humour. The clothes-line scene 
 is the answer to "Poet Ape." The humour of it 
 cannot be analysed. What humour it has ever had for 
 readers or spectators without a personal key to it, is a 
 question for each of us individually to answer upon 
 soul and conscience. With the key, the humour gains 
 something of the quality which all true humour should 
 have — obviousness. But the meaning of the clothes- 
 line scene is obvious only in its main drift ; the wit of 
 the particulars can be made only in part intelligible by 
 a diligent study of Dekker's Satiromastix, which may 
 be commended to those who are curious. " Put off 
 that gown, Trinculo ; by this hand, I'll have that 
 gown," — this probably refers to the official gown of the 
 poet, which Stephano assumes : the tradition of the 
 stage gives him also a mock crown from the frippery. 
 " Mistress line, is not this my jerkin .? Now, jerkin, 
 you are like to lose your hair and prove a bald jerkin " 
 — this wit is too pregnant. Joseph Hunter says, " I 
 am sure it is not worth searching into. It probably 
 has no positive meaning " — which is hardly polite to 
 the author. A jerkin is an inferior garment to a doublet. 
 A jerkin with or without its hair is a figure of speech 
 which must be explained by the long passage on " hair " 
 and "baldness" introduced into Satiromastix with special 
 reference to Horace, or Ben Jonson — a passage which 
 itself needs explanation. A bald jerkin is also a garment 
 that may be worn with either side out indifferently — a 
 coat that can be turned. Lastly, a jerkin which has lost 
 
 284 
 
THE CLOTHES-LINE SCENE 
 
 its hair recalls Ben Jonson's sheepskin in " Poet Ape," 
 from which Shakespeare had snatched the flocks of 
 wool. But any one who essays the thankless task of 
 explaining a joke will agree with Jonson's maxim, 
 quoted with approval from Horace, that it is ill liking 
 stiff jokes — " turpe est difficile s amare nugas." The 
 humour of Stephano swimming ashore upon a butt of 
 sack, which he broached when he had got it into a cave, 
 is the counterpart to that of Prospero being cast adrift 
 in an empty butt. Caliban's worship of him as a 
 divinity will become more intelligible when we discover 
 who the monster was. 
 
 The Boatswain 
 
 Besides the allegorical characters, which are taken in 
 the next chapter, there are only two left to identify — 
 the Master and the Boatswain. The Master is marked 
 by pure negation : he does nothing but tell the Boat- 
 swain to speak to the mariners, and then " exit " 
 (Shakespeare's special direction) at the end of the 
 fourth line of the play. On the other hand, the 
 Boatswain is a fellow of enormous energy and resource ; 
 if any man ever deserved to bring his ship oiF a lee 
 shore, it was surely he. He is most carefully drawn ; 
 in this, as in every other part of the play, there is not 
 a line or a word that had not its purpose in the writer's 
 thought. We are helped to the identity of those two 
 by the company in which they find themselves in 
 Stephano's nautical ditty : 
 
 The master, the swabber, the boatswain and I, 
 The gunner and his mate. 
 
 Here it is the swabber who fixes the attention. No 
 one was entered on a ship's books as swabber ; any of 
 the hands might be set to swab the decks. Swabber in 
 this crew is Decker, honest Tom- Dekker, " a dresser 
 of plays " or indeed a swabber of plays. Therefore 
 
 285 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 we are in a company of playwrights. Beaumont and 
 Fletcher may be guessed to be the gunner and his mate, 
 the wit here being made more than obscure. The 
 Master, who does nothing and is only ornamental, is 
 Samuel Daniel, as will be more apparent after the 
 identification of him with Agamemnon in ' Troilus and 
 Q"essida' (Chapter XII.). As to the Boatswain, the 
 only way to discover him is to try one playwright after 
 another. The choice should fall at length upon Hey- 
 wood, who suits the more exactly the more closely the 
 part of the Boatswain is scanned. On the other hand, let 
 one try Middleton, or Webster, or Ford, or Massinger, 
 or Rowley, and I doubt whether any points of associa- 
 tion can be found, or a convergence of points, in favour 
 of any one of them. 
 
 Heywood was a man of enormous energy. He is 
 said to have acted every day, and he says in a preface 
 that he had " either an entire hand or at least a main 
 finger" in two hundred and twenty plays, which he used 
 to write in taverns ; and after he ceased to write plays, 
 he went on with other work to old age. Of his plays 
 some twenty only are preserved, and the character of 
 these is said to be " enormous bustle : the action never 
 wearies." Among them are three of a nautical cast, 
 "through which blows a salt breeze of the sea." He 
 came from Lincolnshire, and probably from a seaport 
 (if one may infer from his familiarity with sea-subjects), 
 which, if it were Boston, might explain the shortening 
 of the usual " Boatswain " of the text and stage- 
 directions into " Boson " at one place only, where 
 Charles Knight has suspected a punning intention. 
 There is nothing known of his manners or character 
 which would warrant the epithets " insolent," " blas- 
 phemous," " incharitable " hurled at him by two of 
 the passengers. On the contrary, he was modest and 
 unambitious as a man, and as a writer remarkably free 
 from vulgarity and coarseness. Lamb's praise of him 
 is generous to a fault : " He was a fellow - actor 
 
 286 
 
THOMAS HEYWOOD 
 
 and fellow -dramatist with Shakespeare. In all those 
 qualities which gained for Shakespeare the attribute of 
 gentle, he was not inferior to him : — generosity, courtesy, 
 temperance in the depths of passion ; sweetness, in a 
 word, and gentleness. Christianism, and true hearty 
 AngUcism of feelings shaping that Christianism, shine 
 throughout his beautiful writings in a manner more 
 conspicuous than in those of Shakespeare, but only 
 more conspicuous inasmuch as in Heywood these 
 qualities are primary, in the other subordinate to 
 poetry. I love them both equally, but Shakespeare 
 has most of my wonder." If the Boatswain's part be 
 studied, it will be found that his language is always 
 proper, temperate, and as gentle as was consistent with 
 his position in charge of the vessel. When he reappears 
 in the fifth Act, his speech is courteous and hearty. 
 It is only Sebastian and Antonio who discover him to 
 have been a blasphemous, incharitable dog, and insolent 
 noise -maker. The Boatswain is indeed a model of 
 politeness compared with his princely passengers. Their 
 meaning is perhaps to be sought in three plays of 
 Heywood's — the Royal King and Loyal Subject, the Fair 
 Maid of the West, and Fortune by Land and Sea. 
 Heywood, like Middleton and others, sometimes 
 brought real persons upon the stage with an audacity 
 which is accounted for by the popularity of such 
 exhibitions. The Royal King, although thrown back 
 to the time of the Crusades, has a curious likeness to 
 an arbitrary tyrannical Tudor, such as Henry VIII. ; 
 his Loyal Subject has all those qualities which Lamb 
 ascribes to Heywood himself. The Loyal Subject was 
 just the man to exclaim, " What cares these roarers for 
 the name of king ? " and to be perfecdy loyal all the 
 same. The Fair Maid of the West had a special 
 interest for both Essex (Sebastian) and Southampton 
 (Antonio). The fair barmaid of an inn at Plymouth, 
 afterwards landlady of an inn at Fowey, is copied exactly 
 from Southampton's Avisa. She is called Bess Bridges, 
 
 287 
 
REAL PERSONAGES OF 'THE TEMPEST' 
 
 the actual name of the maid-of-honour whom blinking 
 Cupid gossiped so much about in connection with Lord 
 Essex. The play opens with Essex's embarkation at 
 Plymouth on his voyage to the Azores in August 1597, 
 the General himself being a muta persona in the first 
 Act. It is to be noted that Antonio calls the Boatswain 
 a pirate : 
 
 This wide-chopp'd rascal — would thou mightst lie drowning 
 The washing of ten tides ! 
 
 Pirates were executed at low-water mark on the shore 
 of the Thames at Execution Dock and left to be swished 
 about by the flow and ebb of two tides, or three. The 
 second scene of the fifth Act of Heywood's Fortune by 
 Land and Sea is laid " near Execution Dock " : enter 
 the sheriff, the marshal of the Admiralty with the silver 
 oar, and the two pirates going to execution. One of 
 the pirates apostrophises the Thames, 
 
 whose double tides 
 Must overflow our bodies ; and being dead, 
 May the clear waves our scandals wash away, 
 But keep our valour living. 
 
 The meaning of Antonio calling the Boatswain a pirate 
 appears to be, that Heywood had conveyed a plot from 
 Southampton's Avisa, his lordship's exaggerated sense of 
 the value of his literary property, and of the enormous 
 amount of piracy which honest Heywood must have 
 practised before he found plots for his couple of hundred 
 plays, being signified by the wish that the "wide-chopped 
 rascal" might lie drowning the washing of ten tides. 
 Gonzalo's joke, that they were not destined to be 
 drowned inasmuch as the Boatswain was clearly destined 
 to be hanged, his complexion being " perfect gallows," 
 is given to him as proper to his habit of administering 
 " cold comfort." But here also we find a reminiscence 
 of Heywood's play. Fortune by Land and Sea, in which 
 the two pirates, going to execution call the hangman 
 the " boatswain." 
 
 z88 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE ALLEGORIES OF THE ENCHANTED ISLAND 
 
 The least difficult of the allegorical characters is 
 Miranda — she that is to be admired. She is Prospero's 
 offspring, legitimately begottpn, and his heir. Looking 
 into "the dark backward and abysm of time," she 
 could remember being tended by four or five women 
 before she and her father were exiled from Milan, but 
 she knew nothing of the exile itself. The "four or 
 five women " are the Shakespearian women to that date 
 — Portia, Juliet, Titania, Helena, and Constance ; while 
 Prospero's "and more" would be Rosaline, Beatrice 
 and Hero, Julia and Silvia, Mistress Ford, Mistress 
 Page, and Anne Page, Adriana and Luciana, and more, 
 Miranda could remember these, because they were part 
 of herself ; but she could not recall her father's deposi- 
 tion from his dukedom, because it was carried out 
 quietly, was not made an occasion of Prospero's boot- 
 less cries, and was not suffered to perturb the mind of 
 the child. Miranda is the offspring of Shakespeare's 
 brain ; she is brought up by him in solitude until she 
 arrives at maturity : 
 
 Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow. 
 Here in this island we arrived ; and here 
 Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit 
 Than other princess can, that have more time 
 For vainer hours, and tutors not so careful. 
 
 Grown to womanhood, she is ready to be married, and 
 
 289 u 
 
ALLEGORIES OF THE ISLAND 
 
 the alliance is to be with the house of Naples — the 
 cherished project of a Folio of all the plays to be dedi- 
 cated to Lord Pembroke and his heir, reconciling an 
 old unhappy difference, and consummating to all time 
 a union that lay near to Shakespeare's heart. Although 
 Hemminge and Condell profess to have dedicated the 
 folio to Lords Pembroke and Montgomery of their 
 own choice, it can hardly be doubted that they had 
 been instructed to do so by the author himself. 
 
 The Enchanted Island 
 
 The allegory of the Island, and of its original pos- 
 sessors, is intricate and not easily made consistent from 
 every point of view. Prospero gives two series of 
 reminiscences in the beginning of the play, which 
 are difficult to carry out on the stage. The first 
 with Miranda, is to recount how they came to be 
 exiles on an island. The second, with his own spirit, 
 Ariel, is even more enigmatic than the recital of the 
 deposition and exile from the dukedom of Milan : 
 these reminiscences are hardly required to enable the 
 spectator or reader to understand the opening situation 
 and the subsequent action. Sycorax might have been 
 omitted altogether, for anything in the action that turns 
 upon her ; Caliban, as a monster, would have been 
 equally intelligible, or unintelligible, if we had learned 
 no particulars of who his dam was. Ariel's own ante- 
 cedents are not essential to be known ; it is enough 
 that he is Prospero's minister, " an aery spirit " to do 
 his errands for the particular occasion. But many things 
 are told of Sycorax, Caliban, and Ariel with a minute 
 particularity, every word of which was weighed well 
 and meant something to the writer. It is impossible to 
 account for all these details unless in the hypothesis 
 that those parts of the play are an allegory. Every one 
 who professes to see more in Shakespeare than lies on 
 the surface will of course be set down as a finder of 
 
 290 
 
FROM 'ORLANDO FURIOSO ' 
 
 mares' nests. But what if the mares' nests are there ? 
 The play is as full of enigmas as Prospero's island was 
 
 full of noises, 
 Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. 
 
 The several scenes of *The Tempest' are like the 
 Sonnets in another figure of speech : — gems which give 
 out a various radiance, diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, 
 and opals, revealing ever new meanings in new aspects. 
 It is not so very difficult to see his drift at least, 
 inasmuch as he obeys the same association of ideas that 
 is the law of all our minds. Mr. Walter Whiter, of 
 Cambridge, published in 1794 An Attempt to explain 
 and illustrate Various Passages of Shakespeare on a New 
 Principle of Criticism, derived from Mr. Locke's Doctrine 
 of the Association of Ideas. It is indeed the only prin- 
 ciple which has any chance of success. One of the 
 simplest applications of it, which will be objected to by 
 none, is to discover his sources, or to find out what 
 books he used. The book that he was using when he 
 drew up a plan of ' The Tempest ' was undoubtedly 
 Sir John Harington's translation in English verse of 
 the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, published in 1 591 in a 
 handsome folio, it is believed at the instance of the 
 Queen, who was Harington's godmother. It is an 
 excellent example of English printing, and hardly less 
 creditable as an example of the smoothness, flexibility, 
 and rhythmical ease of the English tongue.^ Joseph 
 
 1 It can be made probable, on several grounds, that Sir John Harjngton 
 was the original of Sir Toby Belch, and that the " manakin " Sir Andrew 
 Aguecheek is Sir John Davies, the author of Orchestra ; or A Poeme of 
 Dancing, upon which Harington made an epigram. The wit and humour 
 of 'Twelfth Night" gain much in point if these and other identities be 
 kept in view. Olivia is in part Elizabeth repining after the death of 
 Essex ; Harington was as much in her confidence in that as any one. Her 
 steward Malvolio is Sir William Knollys. The letters, M, O, A, I, which 
 left Malvolio at " a cold scent," are the initials of the words 'in one 
 of Harington's titles, Metamorpkosis of 'Ajax (a-jakes). Aguecheek's 
 share in the fun was not lessened by the feet that the comedy, when new 
 was played in the Hall of the Middle Temple, from which Society Davies 
 had been expelled for a cowardly assault in Hall upon Richard Martin 
 
 091 
 
ALLEGORIES OF THE ISLAND 
 
 Hunter, in 1839, showed that the shipwreck scene with 
 which ' The Tempest ' opens had several resemblances 
 to Ariosto's description of a shipwreck in the 41st 
 Canto, which could not possibly be accidental. The 
 Germans have followed up this clue, and it might 
 have been expected that they had found out everything. 
 Meissner, indeed, in his Untersuchungen fiber Shakespeare^ s 
 " Sturm" {i%']2), has found, in xliii. 13-19, a daughter 
 brought up by her father out of sight of men, whom he 
 supposes the original of Miranda, and in another canto 
 a monster in the sand whom he supposes to be the 
 original of Caliban, together with certain suggestions 
 of Tunis, Argier, etc. This discovery of Miranda 
 may be right ; but Caliban is discovered in the wrong 
 place. It is in the sixth, seventh, and eighth Cantos 
 of Orlando Furioso that the ground-ideas of the alle- 
 gorical part of ' The Tempest ' are to be found ; and 
 those sections of the poem appear to have been over- 
 looked as sources, if I may take the recent thesis of 
 Herr Schoembs (1898), written at the instance of Pro- 
 fessor HQppel, of Strasburg, as the high-water mark of 
 German research. 
 
 The event which brought Shakespeare's designs for 
 ' The Tempest ' to maturity was the shipwreck on the 
 Bermudas of the Admiral's ship in the expedition of 
 1609 sent out by the Virginia Company. The news 
 reached London in 16 10, and several accounts followed, 
 down to Strachey's in 16 13. Lords Southampton and 
 Pembroke were among the principal proprietors of the 
 Virginia Company ; which might have been a reason why 
 Shakespeare put those lords on board the vessel to be 
 wrecked for his ulterior purposes. But it looks as if he 
 
 well known and esteemed as a friend of poets (see Chapman's dedication to 
 him). The circumstances of his expulsion, and of his readmission in 
 November 1 60 1 , have been given by Lord Stowell in vol. xxix. oi Archaeologia. 
 It looks as if the performance of ' Twelfth Night ' in Hall on Candlemas 
 night, 1602, had been a waggish design to welcome him back. Sir Andrew's 
 career at the Bar was resumed, and he became in time Attorney-General in 
 Ireland. Sir Toby aspired to be Archbishop in the same country, and 
 must have been prepared to qualify, or he would not have solicited the office. 
 
 292 
 
FROM 'ORLANDO FURIOSO ' 
 
 had been entertaining the idea of an island with a hermit 
 on it before the actual shipwreck on the Bermudas. 
 Islands were then much in vogue. It was the time 
 when Sancho Panza desired above all things to be the 
 governor of an island. There are three distinct islands 
 in Orlando Furioso, which are combined into the one 
 island of ' The Tempest.' The first is the island of the 
 beautiful witch Alcyna, which was situated outside the 
 Pillars of Hercules some twelve-score leagues, and had 
 a climate the same as Prospero's isle, the air being 
 always "temperate and clear" and "the pastures 
 green." Ariosto's Alcyna was a siren resembling in 
 several respects the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's 
 acquaintance. One singular thing in Alcyna was that 
 her hair was yellow, like golden wire, but her eyes 
 black : 
 
 Under two arches of most curious fashion 
 
 Stand two black eyes that like two clear suns shine 
 
 Steady in look, but apt to take compassion, — 
 
 just like those of the Dark Lady in Sonnet 132. 
 The knight Rogero is caught in her toils, and spends 
 his days in dalliance until he becomes a soft silken 
 person, " himself in nothing but in name," like Tann- 
 hauser in the Venusberg. But some one gives him the 
 ring of Reason, which opens his eyes and shows him the 
 siren changed into a hag, from whom he escapes dis- 
 enchanted. Alcyna had turned to filth, like a rotten 
 apple. She became misshapen, her complexion wan, 
 her skin wrinkled, her hair scant and grey, her figure 
 shrunk to three horse-shoes high, her teeth lost, her 
 chin meeting her nose, her breath noisome. Alcyna as 
 she appeared to Reason is 
 
 The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy 
 Was grown into a hoop. 
 
 Rogero was not the first who had been enslaved 
 by Alcyna. On his way towards her castle, he had 
 stopped and tied his horse to a tree ; the horse pulling 
 
 293 
 
ALLEGORIES OF THE ISLAND 
 
 at his halter had broken down a branch, from which 
 breach a human voice began to speak. It was the 
 spirit of Astolfo, the English duke, who had been 
 imprisoned in this myrtle by Alcyna when he had 
 grown weary of her. Alcyna is here again Sycorax, who 
 imprisoned Ariel in a cloven pine : 
 
 And for thou wast a spirit too delicate 
 To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands. 
 Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee. 
 By help of her more potent ministers 
 And in her most unmitigable rage. 
 Into a cloven pine ; within which rift 
 Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain 
 A dozen years. 
 
 The wood of Astolfo's myrtle tree, when burned on the 
 hearth, shed tears, just as Miranda expected the logs 
 would do which Ferdinand was piling. Astolfo's spirit, 
 speaking from the tree, warns Rogero against Alcyna's 
 wiles ; but he proceeds towards her castle, and on his 
 way meets a crowd of caitiffs : 
 
 A foul deformed, a brutish cursed crew. 
 Bodied like those in antic work devised. 
 Monstrous of shape and of an ugly hue. 
 Like masking Machachinas all disguised. 
 Some look like dogs and some like apes in view. 
 Some dreadful look, and some to be despised : 
 Shameless young folk, and doting foolish aged, 
 Some naked, some drunk, some bedlam-like enraged. 
 
 The captain of this honourable band. 
 
 With belly swoln and puffed, blubberd face. 
 
 Because for drunkenness he could not stand, 
 
 On a hugh tortoise rode a heavier pace ; 
 
 His sergeants all were round about at hand. 
 
 Each one to do his office in his place ; 
 
 Some wipe the sweat, with fans some make a wind. 
 
 Some stay him up before and some behind. 
 
 One of this crew that had his feet and breast 
 Of manlike shape, but like unto a hound 
 In ears, in neck, in mouth, and all the rest. 
 Utters some barking words with currish sound. 
 294 
 
FROM 'ORLANDO FURIOSO' 
 
 Here we have a whole series of ideas for 'The 
 Tempest' — the drunkenness of Stephano, Trinculo, and 
 Caliban ; Caliban as a monster ; Caliban as Stephano's 
 " lieutenant, or my standard," but too drunk to stand, 
 as Trinculo says. Also " some bedlam " is the sugges- 
 tion for the distracted state of the princes who were 
 wandering about Prospero's island. 
 
 Leaving Alcyna's island, we come to the island of 
 Ebuda, which is the scene of much that passes in 
 Orlando Furioso. It was originally inhabited by a king 
 who had an only daughter, innocent and beautiful. 
 She yielded to Proteus, the god of the sea, and was 
 slain by her angry father. Proteus, in revenge, sent a 
 hideous monster, an ork, to frequent the shore of the 
 island and slay the inhabitants. The distressed people 
 consulted the oracle of Apollo, and were advised that 
 guiltless blood must be spilt to avenge the guiltless 
 blood of the slaughtered maid, " Till one be found ttiay 
 with the first compare." Therefore women were daily 
 brought by pirates to the island, to be devoured by 
 the ork. This island of Ebuda, to which women were 
 brought by pirates, becomes the island to which Sycorax 
 was brought " by the sailors " when she was banished 
 from Argier : 
 
 This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child 
 And here was left by the sailors. 
 
 But Alcyna's island is recalled for part of the idea : 
 
 Much like in semblance was it to the place 
 Where Arethusa used herself to hide, 
 Seeking so long her love to have beguil'd 
 Till at the last she found herself with child. 
 
 Lastly, we come to the third island, on which dwelt 
 a hermit in a cave, a holy man who dealt not in incanta- 
 tions but resorted to prayer. By an angel in his sleep 
 he had prescience of Rogero's coming, just as Prospero 
 had prescience of his enemies' voyage by looking upon 
 his magic book. There is a shipwreck, Ariosto's details 
 
 295 
 
ALLEGORIES OF THE ISLAND 
 
 of which are followed closely by Shakespeare, as Joseph 
 Hunter has pointed out already. There was confusion 
 on board : 
 
 Then thought they all hope past, and down they kneel. 
 And unto God to take their souls they pray, — 
 
 which is " All lost ! to prayers, to prayers, all lost," in 
 the play. The Master, however, does not give up 
 hope : 
 
 Yet did the master by all means assay 
 To steer out roomer, or to keep aloof. 
 Or at the least to strike sails if they may, 
 As in such danger was for their behoof. 
 
 Harington has a marginal note : " They that have been 
 at the sea do understand these phrases." Shakespeare 
 has been justly commended for the accuracy of his 
 seamanship ; but there is little in it that he might not 
 have got from Harington, or he might have taken his 
 hint and gone to them that "do understand these 
 phrases." 
 
 Boats. Heigh, my hearts ; cheerly, cheerly, my hearts ! yare, 
 yare ! Take in the topsail. Tend to the master's whistle. Blow, 
 till thou burst thy wind, if room enough, — 
 
 which last is Harington's quaint adverbial phrase, " steer 
 out roomer." Again, " Down with the topmast " is 
 " Or at the least to strike sails if they may." 
 Once more, in Ariosto's shipwreck, 
 
 Each man therein his life strives to protect. 
 Of king nor prince no man takes heed or note ; 
 
 which becomes : 
 
 Boats. Hence ! What cares these roarers for the name of king ? 
 To cabin ; silence ! trouble us not ! 
 
 Gon. Good ; yet remember whom thou hast aboard. 
 Boats. None that I love more than myself. 
 
 They leap into the boat or into the water, Rogero 
 escaping by swimming " many an hour " ; which is the 
 hint for Stephano's brag, with some occult meaning in 
 
 296 
 
THE MAGIC BOOK 
 
 the numerical precision : " I swam, ere I could recover 
 the shore, five-and-thirty leagues off and on." Rogero 
 climbs up the steep rock, to find on the level ground a 
 cave in which an aged hermit dwelt. The hermit 
 subsisted by " eating berries, drinking water clear " ; 
 which is varied to Caliban's " water with berries in it." 
 This hermit did not use magic, but prayer ; he got 
 prescience by holy dreams, like Ananias in Acts ix. lo. 
 Rogero is brought to penitence, and in that mood is 
 reconciled with Orlando, who has visited the island with 
 a wounded knight to be healed by the hermit. Here 
 we have the idea of penitence as the preliminary to 
 reconciliation, which is of actual importance in Acts IV. 
 and V, of ' The Tempest.' Prospero is compounded of 
 this hermit on an island and of Ariosto's other hermit, 
 who lived in a wood and used magic. He appears 
 first in Canto ii., and again in Canto xlii. A damsel 
 meets him in the wood, and craves his help to prevent 
 a certain quarrel which was imminent : 
 
 Unto her safety promising to look, 
 
 Out of his bag forthwith he drew a book — 
 
 A book of skill and learning so profound 
 
 That of a leaf he had not made an end 
 
 But that there rose a spirit from under ground, 
 
 Whom like a page he doth of arrants send. 
 
 This sprite, by words of secret virtue bound. 
 
 Goes where these knights their combat did intend. 
 
 This is Prospero's magic book, and the spirit from 
 under ground is Ariel (of the 29th of Isaiah), whom he 
 sends upon his "arrants." The pagan hermit who 
 used magic is seen again at work in xlii. 34 : 
 
 And straight from thence he go'th into the place 
 
 Where he was wont the spirits to conjure, 
 
 — A strong cave, vast, in which there was great space — 
 
 The precepts of his art to put in ure. 
 
 One sprite he calls, etc. 
 
 This place of the spirits may be the source of a 
 picturesque touch by Ariel : 
 
 297 
 
ALLEGORIES OF THE ISLAND 
 
 In the deep nook where once 
 Thou call'dst me up at midnight to fetch dew 
 From the still-vex'd Bermoothes. 
 
 Prospero throughout the play is that hermit of Ariosto 
 who uses magic ; but he changes in the end to the 
 hermit who uses prayer, namely, in the Epilogue, which 
 we may piously believe to be the last lines from the 
 author's pen : 
 
 Now my charms are all o'erthrown, 
 And what strength I have's mine own, 
 Which is most faint. . . . 
 
 Now I want 
 Spirits to enforce, art to enchant. 
 And my ending is despair, 
 Unless I be relieved by prayer. 
 Which pierces so that it assaults 
 Mercy itself, and frees all faults. 
 
 This is the most dexterous of all the transformations of 
 the Ariosto romance, as it passed through the alembic 
 of his own thought ; here, if anywhere, Prospero is 
 Shakespeare himself. 
 
 Sycorax 
 
 Although Sycorax is not one of the characters, nor 
 even essential to the plot, she is an element of great 
 importance in the history of Prospero's spirit. Sycorax is 
 short for Psychorax, or Psyche-Corax, the Raven-Spirit, 
 as Francis Douce was the first to point out, although 
 the derivation had been staring every one in the face in 
 the first words that Caliban utters on the stage : 
 
 As wicked dew as e'er my mother brush'd 
 With raven feather from unwholesome fen. 
 
 Douce cited from Batman uppon Bartholomew a passage 
 about ravens and dew which had been in Shakespeare's 
 mind. Why this allegorical person should be a raven is 
 a more difficult question. Sycorax stands, as I believe, 
 for more than one woman in the author's experience. 
 
 298 
 
SYCORAX 
 
 As to one of these, Mistress Fitton, she was not only 
 dark, but was actually called the Crow from her bird- 
 like profile. As to another, his wife, I suspect that it 
 was the croaking raven that was meant. Sycorax, as 
 Prospero recalls her to the memory of Ariel, has strik- 
 ing points of likeness to the witch Alcyna in Ariosto's 
 romance, as already pointed out : 
 
 Pros. Dost thou forget 
 
 From what a torment I did free thee ? . . . 
 
 Art. I do not, sir. 
 
 Pros. Thou liest, malignant thing ! Hast thou forgot 
 The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy- 
 Was grown into a hoop ? Hast thou forgot her ? 
 
 Ari. No, sir. 
 
 Pros. Thou hast. Where was she born ? Speak, tell me. 
 
 Ari. Sir, in Argier. 
 
 Pros. O, was she so ? I must 
 
 Once in a month recount what thou hast been. 
 Which thou forget'st. This damn'd witch Sycorax, 
 For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible 
 To enter human hearing, from Argier, 
 Thou know'st, was banished : for one thing she did 
 They would not take her life. Is not this true ? 
 
 Ari. Ay, sir. 
 
 Pros. This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child 
 And here was left by the sailors. Thou, my slave, 
 As thou report'st thyself, wast then her servant ; 
 And for thou wast a spirit too delicate 
 To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands, 
 Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee. 
 By help of her more potent ministers 
 And in her most unmitigable rage. 
 Into a cloven pine : within which rift 
 Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain 
 A dozen years ; within which space she died 
 And left thee there ; where thou didst vent thy groans 
 As fast as mill-wheels strike. Then was this island — 
 Save for the son that she did litter here, 
 A freckled whelp hag-born — not honour'd with 
 A human shape. 
 
 Ari. Yes, Caliban her son." 
 
 Pros. Dull thing, I say so ; he that Caliban 
 Whom now I keep in service. Thou best know'st 
 What torment I did find thee in j thy groans 
 Did make wolves howl and penetrate the breasts 
 
 299 
 
ALLEGORIES OF THE ISLAND 
 
 Of ever angry bears : it was a torment 
 To lay upon the damn'd, which Sycorax 
 Could not again undo ; it was mine art, 
 When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape 
 The pine and let thee out. 
 
 An. I thank thee, master. 
 
 Pros. If thou more murmur'st, I will rend an oak 
 And peg thee in his knotty entrails till 
 Thou hast howl'd away twelve winters. 
 
 The particularity of all this about Sycorax is not for 
 nothing, and ought to arrest the attention. First there 
 is the name itself, derived from the Greek word for 
 raven or crow. Next, it is singular that Prospero 
 should question Ariel's knowledge of her birthplace. 
 He hints plainly that she was not born in Argier, 
 although there must have been reason to think so ; the 
 meaning of which is that Sycorax is more than one 
 woman, and that the first Sycorax was not born in 
 Argier, Argier is an archaic form of Algiers, here 
 chosen for the sake of the metathesis Regia (only one r 
 being taken), which is Latin for the royal household 
 (^Regia domus). The same connection with the Court 
 is hinted still more plainly in a later statement about 
 Caliban's dam : 
 
 His mother was a witch, and one so strong 
 
 That could control the Moon, make flows and ebbs. 
 
 And deal in her command without her power. 
 
 The Moon, by virtue of her " command," is a person, 
 and the person of those times who was often called the 
 Moon, or Cynthia, was Queen Elizabeth ; she is known, 
 on one occasion at least, to have shown special favour 
 to her maid-of-honour. Mistress Fitton. But it is in 
 vain to seek particular proof that any one of her house- 
 hold could control the Moon, and deal in her command 
 without her power, or to speculate whether the ebbs 
 and flows had anything to do with Shakespeare's own 
 fortunes. 
 
 The most remarkable fact related of Sycorax is that 
 300 
 
SYCORAX AND ARIEL 
 
 Ariel was at one time her servant, that his delicacy 
 rebelled against her earthy and abhorred commands, 
 and that he was therefore confined by her in a cloven 
 pine for twelve years, venting his groans with the regu- 
 larity of the strokes of a miJl-wheel. 
 
 It was a torment 
 To lay upon the damn'd, which Sycorax 
 Could not again undo ; it was mine art. 
 When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape 
 The pine and let thee out. 
 
 Prospero is severe with his own spirit, Ariel, over this 
 old affair of Sycorax. He accuses Ariel of forgetting, 
 and when Ariel protests, he repeats the charge : " Thou 
 liest, malignant thing ! " and once more, after another 
 protest, "Thou hast forgot her." In fine, Prospero 
 says : 
 
 I must 
 
 Once in a month recount what thou hast been. 
 
 Which thou forget'st. 
 
 This striking phrase, "once in a moneth" (as the old. 
 text has it), has puzzled the commentators. But one 
 of them, the excellent antiquary Francis Douce, has 
 indirectly supplied the key to it by his note upon a 
 similar phrase, " a month's mind," in ' Two Gentlemen 
 of Verona', I. ii. 137 : " It alludes to the mind or remem- 
 brance days of our Popish ancestors. Persons in their 
 wills often directed that in a month, or any other specific 
 time from the day of their decease, some solemn office 
 for the repose of their souls, as a mass or dirge, should 
 be performed in the parish church, with a suitable 
 charity or benevolence on the occasion. Polydore 
 Vergil has shown that the custom is of Roman origin ; 
 and he seems to speak of the month's mind as a cere- 
 mony peculiar to the English." 
 
 Sycorax having shut up Ariel within the cloven pine, 
 " could not again undo " her work, and meanwhile died, 
 leaving the spirit in torment until the end of twelve 
 
 301 
 
ALLEGORIES OF THE ISLAND 
 
 years. Once in a month Prospero was to recall the 
 memory of that time. It was a solemn religious office, 
 to be repeated at intervals for the chastening of Ariel, 
 if not for the repose of Sycorax, Prospero's stern 
 admonition of his own spirit being Shakespeare's self- 
 discipline in certain affairs of his past life. In Pros- 
 pero's reminiscences with Ariel there are two periods of 
 twelve years each, and a third period in prospect. The 
 spirit is supposed to have been confined in a cloven pine 
 for twelve years before Prospero arrived on the island 
 to let him out. Thereafter he was Prospero's free 
 spirit doing his errands for twelve years, according to 
 the time-scheme of the narrative to Miranda, which 
 brings us to the date of ' The Tempest.' If we take 
 his deposition from the dukedom of Milan, and his 
 exile to the island, to be the loss of the Laurel Crown, 
 the date is the year 1599 ; and the twelve years follow- 
 ing upon the island, during which Miranda had grown 
 from a child of three to maturity, bring us to the year 
 161 1, the date of the play. In that reckoning the 
 twelve years of Ariel's imprisonment in the cloven pine 
 should begin at 1587, which is also the approximate date 
 of Shakespeare's becoming an actor. But the malign 
 influence of Sycorax had been at work before ; which 
 should mean that she was a witch of his youth before 
 he left home. Although that seems inconsistent with 
 what is said elsewhere of Sycorax — her residence in 
 Argier (the Court), her power to control the Moon 
 (the Queen), etc. — yet there can be no real inconsist- 
 ency in the allegory. It was not correct to assume 
 that Sycorax was born in Argier. This is not the least 
 important of the revelations in Prospero's story of his 
 life. It is known that the circumstances of his marriage 
 at eighteen were peculiar ; but they were more complex 
 than his biographers have been willing to recognise, 
 according to the particulars in the note.^ It was the 
 
 1 Halliwell-Phillipps, on one of his visits to the ecclesiastical records of 
 Worcester, was shown by the keeper of them the following entry : « Item 
 
 30? 
 
SYCORAX AND ARIEL 
 
 Sycorax of his early Stratford period who was the 
 cause of his spirit being imprisoned in a cloven pine 
 — that is to say, the wooden frame of a London play- 
 house. The allegory should therefore mean that he left 
 home on account of some domestic trouble. Ariel was a 
 spirit too delicate to obey the " grand bests " of Sycorax, 
 which were doubtless enforced with all the advantage of 
 eight years' seniority. There is a very feeling picture 
 of domestic discord in another part of ' The Tempest,' 
 in which De Quincey read, " as in subtle hieroglyphics," 
 the author's own experience : 
 
 If thou dost break her virgin-knot before 
 All sanctimonious ceremonies may 
 With full and holy rite be minister'd. 
 No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall 
 To make this contract grow ; but barren hate. 
 Sour-eyed disdain and discord shall bestrew 
 The union of your bed with weeds so loathly 
 That you shall hate it both. 
 
 Upon Ariel's refusal, Sycorax " in her unmitigable rage " 
 
 eodem die [27 November 1582] sirailis emanavit licencia [i.e. matrimonii] 
 inter Willielmum Shaxpere et Annam Whateley de Temple Grafton." 
 There is no subsequent entry of the marriage bond and licence, issued on 
 the following day, between him and Ann Hathway. Of course Ann 
 Whateley and Ann Hathway were not the same person ; moreover, 
 Temple Grafton is a village and parish half-a-dozen miles distant from 
 Stratford, named in the schedule of the bond as the other woman's 
 parish. It was on the 28th November that Fulk Sandells and John 
 Richardson entered into their bond of forty pounds. Among the condi- 
 tions of the bond, according to which it was either to be void and of none 
 effect or else to stand in full force and virtue, the chief one is, " if the said 
 Willm. Shagspere do not proceed to solemnisation of marriage with the 
 said Anne Hathwey, without the consent of hir frinds." He was forced 
 into the marriage under a heavy penalty ; and the occasion was, because 
 he had gone to Worcester the day before and brought back a licence to 
 marry the woman of his choice, Ann Whateley of Temple Grafton. De 
 Quincey suspected that Ann Hathway had inveigled the youth, so that he 
 came under a moral obligation to marry her. It is this legal fulfilment of 
 a. moral obligation that the poet refers to in the en'voi of the 1 1 6th Sonnet : 
 
 Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks. 
 But bears it out even to the edge of doom. 
 
 If this be 'error, and upon me proved, 
 
 / never ivrit, nor no man ever loved, 
 
 I take " nor no man ever loved " to mean, that the man whom he loved 
 most, his father, had prevailed with him to do the right thing. 
 
 303 
 
ALLEGORIES OF THE ISLAND 
 
 obtained the help " of her more potent ministers," and 
 something followed which resulted in Ariel being shut 
 up for twelve years within a cloven pine. If there 
 were a scene and an open rupture, it is probable that 
 an earlier reference to the same domestic upset is to 
 be found in the enigmatic account of "the earth- 
 quake " given in the artless reminiscences of the Nurse 
 in ' Romeo and Juliet.' This earthquake cannot be 
 found in the catalogue of telluric commotions ; it is 
 pointed out, indeed, that there was one at Verona in 
 1348, which might suit the period of the Montagues 
 and the Capulets in a vague way, and that there was 
 one in England in 1580; but there is none which suits 
 the date of "eleven years" before the time of writing, 
 the summer of 1596. The Nurse was sitting in the 
 sun under the Dove-house wall when the earthquake 
 happened : " Shake, quoth the Dove-house, 'twas 
 no need, I trow, to bid me trudge." The Dove-house 
 is a reminiscence of Stratford, the Dovehouse Close, 
 and the Boundary Elm at the end of the Close, being 
 mentioned in a document of 1 5 9 1 . The great Boundary 
 Elm existed to the time of Charles Knight, on the 
 road to Henley-in-Arden, about two or three hundred 
 yards distant in a direct line from the home of the 
 Shakespeares in Henley Street. " Trudge " is not the 
 word that the Nurse should have used for so short a 
 distance. She, or rather he, trudged all the way to 
 London.^ In Rowe's account, which embodied the 
 
 1 There are several things in the Nurse's reminiscences, besides the Dove- 
 house, which betray Shakespeare's domestic affairs at Stratford. Juliet is 
 not out fourteen on the eve of her marriage ; although Brooke had made 
 her sixteen and Painter eighteen. She had been kept at the breast until 
 she was three, and able to run about. Both have been defended as proper 
 to the latitude of Verona, and as instances of the author's knowledge of and 
 fidelity to North Italian nature. One need not seek any other reason than 
 his wish to make Juliet the same age as his own Susanna, or some nine 
 months older (she was baptized on 26th May 1583) ; and to make the 
 weaning of the child, by means of wormwood on the dug, to symbolise 
 another alienation, also preceded by a course of wormwood, which required 
 the nursing to be three years. The weaning was in progress before the 
 earthquake, and would have been inevitable in any case after it. 
 
 304 
 
SYCORAX AND ARIEL 
 
 gleanings of Betterton made on a visit to Stratford 
 probably seventy or eighty years after Shakespeare's 
 death, it is said that " he was obliged to leave his busi- 
 ness and family in Warwickshire for some time, and 
 shelter himself in London." This implies that he came 
 back after a time, and that is how Halliwell-Phillipps 
 understands the matter — that he left home in 1585, 
 but with no intention of going on the stage, nor with 
 any definite prospect at all ; that he was again in Strat- 
 ford in 1587 (at the time when his assent would have 
 been given to the proposed arrangement of the mort- 
 gage on his mother's inheritance of Asbies, in which he 
 had a contingent interest) ; and that he did not become 
 an actor until his return to London in that year, perhaps 
 along with one of the strolling companies which visited 
 the town in the summer and autumn. The twelve 
 years of Ariel's imprisonment in the cloven pine should 
 begin at 1587 if we count back from 1599 as the date 
 of the exile to the Island ; and the date of the earth- 
 quake, eleven years before the writing of * Romeo and 
 Juliet' (the summer of 1596), would correspond with 
 his sudden departure from Stratford in 1585 owing to 
 some great upheaval in his home. 
 
 Among the "more potent ministers" of Sycorax, 
 who helped to bring about Ariel's imprisonment in the 
 cloven pine, we should probably include Sir Thomas Lucy, 
 whom tradition associates with the cause of Shakespeare's 
 leaving home. The deer-stealing, although real, must 
 still seem insufficient to account for all that followed. 
 FalstafF admitted frankly, and without the smallest 
 shame, that he had beaten Justice Shallow's men, killed 
 his deer, and broken open his lodge ; but he denied 
 that he had kissed his keeper's daughter. There must 
 have been something more in question than the poaching ; 
 and one may surmise that Sir Thomas, the fatherly 
 Puritan justice of the neighbourhood, had been called 
 in to arbitrate in some domestic matter. It is not 
 incredible that Shakespeare may have borne a grudge 
 
 305 X 
 
ALLEGORIES OF THE ISLAND 
 
 against Lucy for his judgment in the matter, whatever 
 it was ; but it is necessary to assume that there must 
 have been a fresh occasion of animosity at the time 
 of writing ' The Merry Wives of Windsor ' (probably 
 in 1598), aiid 'The Second Part of Henry IV.' (soon 
 after) ; and the nature of the humour in the former 
 play, both with Slender (Francis Thynne of the Heralds' 
 College) and with Shallow, leads one to suspect that 
 Sir Thomas Lucy had been active in opposing Shake- 
 speare's application for a grant of arms to his father. 
 I have already pointed out that he probably owed the 
 success of his second application, in 1599, to the good 
 offices of another Warwickshire squire, Fulke Greville : 
 that appears to be the meaning of the " rich garments " 
 which were included by Gonzalo among the stores 
 shipped on board the rotten carcase of the butt. 
 
 While the cloven pine is the wooden frame of the 
 playhouse, the knotty entrails of an oak, in which 
 Ariel had the farther prospect of howling away twelve 
 winters after his twelve years of freedom (1599-1611), 
 are the oaken desk or chest in which Prospero kept his 
 papers. The possibility of " more toil " to Ariel was 
 in preparing the great folio for the press. It seems 
 very reasonable to conclude that some necessary work 
 was done upon the manuscripts and printed quartos of 
 the plays during the last years of retirement. Several 
 of them, such as ' Julius Caesar ' and * The Tempest,' 
 have perfect texts. They must have been found in 
 fairly good order to come out so well as they do in the 
 folio. The testimony of Hemminge and Condell, that 
 " we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers," 
 may mean, of course, that " he never blotted a line," as 
 Ben Jonson understood it, and as the context implies. 
 Still, the threat of the oaken desk for his spirit, Ariel, 
 during another period of twelve years should mean at 
 least an intention to revise for the press. Strangely 
 enough, the third period of twelve years, from 161 1, 
 was fulfilled literally, the folio having been published in 
 
 306 
 
CALIBAN 
 
 1623. It is conceivable that the author may have left 
 directions to delay publication until a certain date. As 
 it happened, the volume appeared just after the death 
 of his widow. 
 
 Caliban 
 
 Caliban is one of the most difficult and many-sided 
 of the allegories. As an amusing monster he is quite 
 successful on the stage, without any recondite study of 
 what is implied by him. Like Stephano when he first 
 set eyes on him, we recognise his market value as a 
 curiosity of nature ; he would be a fortune in England, 
 or in Naples, to any showman. Here, as in every 
 other part of the comedy, Shakespeare is the master 
 magician, who could both please the public and perplex 
 the philosophers. Renan has written a drama upon 
 Caliban. Robert Browning has read a meaning out of 
 a few lines, just as he has expanded Childe Rowland and 
 the dark Tower. Bishop Warburton has opened up a 
 whole train of thought by his discovery that Caliban is 
 a metathesis of cannibal. In what sense was Caliban a 
 cannibal ? Certainly not in a material sense ; for he 
 appears to have been on the whole a vegetarian, as well 
 as a water-drinker until Stephano made him drunk with 
 sack. If we can discover what Shakespeare meant by 
 Caliban as a cannibal, we shall not be far from under- 
 standing the allegory as a whole. 
 
 But first we are instructed carefully in the monster's 
 parentage. He was the freckled whelp of Sycorax, who 
 had been brought to the island to be delivered of him. 
 After the death of Sycorax, the island belonged to 
 Caliban by right, so that he always looked upon 
 Prospero as a usurper, and was quite ready to enter 
 into a conspiracy with Stephano to destroy him. The 
 monster had a mother, but no father : for that is the 
 meaning of his being called a moon-calf. On Prospero's 
 first coming to the island, he made much of Caliban, 
 who in turn showed him the fresh springs and other 
 
 307 
 
ALLEGORIES OF THE ISLAND 
 
 things necessary for subsistence. But as years went on, 
 Prospero came to loathe the monster, and the monster 
 to hate Prospero, who used him as a drudge to fetch in 
 firing, clean platters, and the like. When Stephano 
 appeared, Caliban was only too pleased to get a new 
 master, leaving Prospero to get a new man. 
 
 Warburton's derivation of Caliban from cannibal 
 really carries us into the bishop's own province of 
 divinity. We get a hint of the sense in which the 
 monster was a cannibal from one of the epithets addressed 
 to him, "Thou earth." The ideas of cannibal and 
 earth had been associated already in one of the greatest 
 of the sonnets, the 146th, the famous apostrophe to the 
 Soul, based upon the apostrophe to Ariel in the 29th 
 chapter of Isaiah. It will be observed that the idea of 
 cannibal is contained in the penultimate line — "Death 
 that feeds on men," cannibal death : 
 
 Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, 
 — My sins these rebel powers that thee array, — 
 Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth. 
 Painting thy outward walls so costly gay ? 
 Why so large cost, having so short a lease. 
 Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend ? 
 Shall worms, inheritors of this excess. 
 Eat up thy charge ? is this thy body's end ? 
 Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss, 
 And let that pine to aggravate thy store ; 
 Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross ; 
 Within be fed, without be rich no more : 
 
 So shall thou feed on Death, that feeds on men. 
 And Death once dead, there's no more dying then. 
 
 Shakespeare's " Poor soul, the centre of my sinful 
 earth " is St. Paul's " O wretched man that I am, who 
 shall deliver me from this body of death ? " The sonnet 
 is thoroughly Pauline, not at all Platonist : full of the 
 practical doctrine of the spiritualising body, saying 
 nothing of the metaphysics of the disembodied spirit. 
 Like all true professors, he carries his religion into his 
 proper business ; so that Caliban is not merely his own 
 
 308 
 
CALIBAN 
 
 sinful earth, his body of death, but also the rough world 
 in which he worked, the gross stage, the vulgar public 
 taste, the deformities of human nature : 
 
 I pitied thee, 
 Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour 
 One thing or other : when thou didst not, savage, 
 Know thine own meaning, but would'st gabble like 
 A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes 
 With words that made them known. 
 
 It is a proud claim to have made ; but Shakespeare 
 always knew his own value, and the world has endorsed 
 his estimate. 
 
 309 
 
BOOK III 
 
 SEQUEL TO THE SONNETS 
 
 3H 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 In 'The Tempest' Shakespeare-Prospero is a prince, 
 and the most august figure in all that company. It is 
 an exacting part to play, requiring an actor of genius to 
 enter into the spirit of it ; and one can believe that 
 Macready, who played it often, may have succeeded in 
 being the potent exile without being self-conscious. 
 In more ordinary hands there is always the risk that the 
 stately Prospero may leave upon one the impression of 
 a superior person. Until we come to the Epilogue, we 
 are not suffered to know that he has any human frailties 
 or faults ; he puts them all upon his spirit Ariel ; and 
 having dismissed Ariel, he confesses them in his proper 
 person. The real Shakespeare, in his everyday relations 
 with the other poets of his time, is not in ' The Tempest,' 
 but in ' Troilus and Cressida ' ; and there the picture 
 which he draws of himself and of them is not only 
 supremely witty but also highly pleasing, such a 
 picture as this age of his admirers and worshippers may 
 love to dwell upon. He is considerate and polite to 
 Daniel ; cordial and intimate with Chapman ; affectionate 
 towards the aged Churchyard, a survival from the past ; 
 a familiar companion to John Fletcher ; and com- 
 plimentary to Francis Beaumont on his aspiring and 
 gallant spirit. Even to his inveterate enemy, Ben 
 Jonson, he is not unfair ; and the scurillous Marston 
 he paints no blacker than Marston did himself. 
 Shakespeare is his own Achilles ; and just as Prospero 
 
 313 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 is severe with his spirit Ariel, treating the delicate airy 
 creature with a harshness that seems cruel, so Achilles 
 looks into himself and probes his wounded pride and 
 spleen like an unflinching surgeon. 
 
 This outline of the Greek side of the comedy I draw 
 with confidence, because all the parts hang together in 
 their details, as they are exhibited in the sequel. In 
 ' Troilus and Cressida,' as in ' The Tempest,' what we 
 require first of all is the key to an enigma ; having 
 found the key, the spirit and wit of the whole elaborate 
 design reveal themselves in the course of a moderately 
 attentive study of the text. The antecedent reasons 
 for including this comedy in the limited number 
 of Shakespeare's enigma-plays are twofold : first, that 
 without a key it leaves the efl?ect of a jest upon the 
 famous Tale of Troy, and of a caricature of one or 
 more of the individual heroes ; and secondly, that it is 
 curiously particular, both in incident and characterisation, 
 just where it diverges most from the classical sources. 
 The author has been defended on one or other of two 
 grounds : either that he has interpreted Homer and 
 classical antiquity correctly and with sympathy, but 
 with a philosophic insight so deep as to be mis- 
 apprehended (two Viennese writers) ^ ; or that he has 
 really caricatured the ancient heroes, but has done so 
 inadvertently by trusting to the distorted and scoffing 
 version of Lydgate. The latter hypothesis proceeds on 
 the well-known assumption, that a man of genius is a 
 simpleton; the former is, like many more from the 
 same foreign source, stimulating and informing to an 
 English reader, but inadmissible on grounds of prob- 
 ability. There is a third course open to us with 
 'Troilus and Cressida,' the course taken by Mr. 
 Swinburne : to exclaim " O wonderful, wonderful ! " 
 
 ' Dr. Adolf Bekk, Shakespeare and Homer, Text of Troilus and 
 Cressida, with Introduction. Pest und Wien, 1865. Adolf Gelber, 
 Shakespeare' sche Probleme, N.F., Troilus and Cressida, with Introduction 
 of pp. 72. Wien, 1898. The play was produced at Vienna recently. 
 
 314 
 
'TROILUS AND CRESSIDA' 
 
 and give up the problem. " Alike in its most palpable 
 perplexities," he writes, "and in its most patent 
 splendours, this political and philosophic and poetic 
 problem, this hybrid and hundred-faced and hydra- 
 headed prodigy, at once defies and derides all definitive 
 comment " ; it is in vain to seek " to read the riddle of 
 Shakespeare's design in the procreation of this mysterious 
 and magnificent monster of a play . . . the perplexities 
 of the whole matter seem literally to crowd and thicken 
 upon us at every step." I venture to say that we have 
 only to find the right key in order to understand the 
 parable as a whole and in nearly all its several parts. 
 Shakespeare himself is Achilles in his tent ; the wrath 
 of Achilles is Shakespeare's wounded pride, because he 
 had been refused the titular leadership, the Laurel Crown, 
 for a certain reason. The Greeks are the poets and 
 thinkers, the Trojans the soldiers and statesmen, or the 
 men of action ; the episode of Cressida is brought in to 
 supply the required female element in a play, and is 
 also modernised in keeping with the rest. 
 
 When the comedy was first printed in 1609, the 
 publishers recommended it, in a preface, as the most 
 witty production of an author who was celebrated for 
 his wit : " passing full of the palm comical," the work 
 of a " brain that never undertook anything comical 
 vainly " ; one of many witty plays from the same pen, 
 but " amongst all there is none more witty than this " ; 
 and, still farther to mark its choice quality, readers will 
 not "like this the less for not being sullied with the 
 smoaky breath of the multitude, but thank fortune for 
 the scape it hath had amongst you " — as if the intention 
 to perform it on the stage had been thwarted. I believe 
 this to be Shakespeare's own estimate of his work, and 
 that he put forward the publishers to make it, just as 
 he employed Thorpe, in the same year, to father the 
 dedication of the Sonnets. Without a key to the 
 characters, much of the wit is lost : we can see that the 
 wit is there, but we miss the point of it. Is it con- 
 
 315 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 ceivable that readers in 1609 were equally in the dark 
 as to the inward meaning of this elaborately constructed 
 play, " passing full of the palm comical " ? It is more 
 reasonable to suppose that it was an open secret amongst 
 the class to whom the preface is addressed. 
 
 Dr. Johnson was not of the opinion that Shakespeare 
 kept aloof from the scenic personalities which were so 
 common on the stage in his time ; but he has made 
 his judgment unacceptable by dwelling solely upon 
 satire, invective, and private malice : "I am not of 
 opinion that the satire of Shakespeare is so seldom 
 personal. It is of the nature of personal invective 
 to be soon unintelligible ; and the author that gratifies 
 private malice — animam in vulnere ponit — destroys the 
 future efiicacy of his own writings, and sacrifices the 
 esteem of succeeding times to the laughter of a day. 
 It is no wonder, therefore, that the sarcasms which, 
 perhaps, in our author's time, 'set the playhouse in a 
 roar,' are now lost among general reflections." This 
 note was written upon the part of Holofernes in 
 ' Love's Labour's Lost,' which was certainly not a 
 comedy for the roaring playhouse. It would have 
 been more apposite to the unfair satire of Sir Thomas 
 Lucy as Justice Shallow (although that has not lost 
 its efEcacy) — an exceptional case of malice which 
 Shakespeare is almost certainly crying peccavi for in 
 the I loth Sonnet : 
 
 Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, 
 Made old offences of affections new : 
 Most true it is that I have look'd on truth 
 Askance and strangely, 
 
 -—in making Shallow the associate of FalstafF in drunken 
 orgies, and his dupe. 
 
 If Shakespeare had " wanted art " to the extent that 
 Ben Jonson believed, Samuel Johnson might have been 
 right in his prophecy, that our author had " sacrificed 
 the esteem of succeeding times to the laughter of a day." 
 
 316 
 
'TROILUS AND CRESSIDA' 
 
 The truth is nearly the other way round. He is so deep 
 and subtle in his personalities, whether from caution or 
 from scruples, that the plays which contain them must 
 have owed their popularity to other causes. It is clear 
 from the preface to ' Troilus and Cressida ' that it was 
 given out as a pre-eminently witty play. Intended for 
 discerning readers, fortunate in having escaped popular 
 applause. A good many persons who read it in 1609 
 must have found a key to the wit of it before they had 
 finished. It is not difficult to recover the key, even in 
 this distant age, by following the method that has been 
 taken with ' The Tempest.' 
 
 The play was probably written in 1 602-1 603. There 
 is an entry in the Stationers' Register by Roberts, the 
 printer of 'Hamlet' (same year), under the date of 
 7 February 16^, of "The Booke of Troilus and 
 Cresseda as yt is acted by my Lord Chamberlen's men," 
 followed by the remark, " to print when he hath gotten 
 sufficient authority for it." It was not printed until 
 1 609, and then it appeared that it had never been acted 
 — "never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed 
 by the palms of the vulgar." In another issue of the 
 same year, 1609, ^7 the same publishers, the leaf with 
 the preface was omitted, and a new title-page printed 
 with the words inserted, " As it was lately acted by 
 the King's Majesty's servants at the Globe." One way 
 of dealing with the difference of the title-pages is to 
 accuse the publishers, Messrs Bonian and Walley, of 
 being pirates and liars : this assumption as to the 
 character of Elizabethan publishers, and the helplessness 
 of authors as well as of Stationers' Hall, is always at the 
 service of certain Shakespearians. But there is no 
 need for it in the present instance. The phrase in the 
 original copyright entry of 1 603 is unique : " As it is 
 acted." In all other instances, whether of his copyright 
 entries or of title-pages, the phrase is either " hath been 
 acted," or " was acted," or " was lately acted " : there 
 is no exception but this, which may be taken to mean 
 
 317 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 that the play was only in rehearsal at the time the entry 
 was made. Several things happened within the next 
 few weeks, which are sufficient to explain why the 
 intended performance at the Globe was not gone on 
 with, without assuming that the licenser stopped it 
 owing to its veiled personalities or to its improprieties. 
 The Queen died in the end of March 1603, and before 
 her funeral was well over, the plague was at such a 
 height that the theatres would be closed according to 
 the rule of thirty deaths per week. We miss the precise 
 data of Henslowe's Diary for this plague-period ; but, 
 as we know from him that plague closed his theatres 
 from Midsummer 1592 until Christmas 1593, with the 
 exception of the month of January 1593, it is fairly 
 certain that the very severe plague of 1603 did the 
 same for the latter eight months of the year. The 
 next year was nearly free from plague, and in 1605 it 
 was not severe ; but every year thereafter until 16 10 
 came under the rule of thirty deaths a week for some 
 eight months of the year ; and we know from Dekker's 
 express statement that in 1 606 " the doors were locked 
 and the flag taken down." It was possible, no doubt, 
 to have played 'Troilus and Cressida' in 1604 or 1605, 
 or in the mid-winter of other years before 1609, when it 
 was at length produced on the Globe stage. Whatever 
 the reason, it was delayed both in the printing and in 
 the playing until 1609, having been put upon the stage 
 shortly after it was published, and probably on account 
 of the interest which it had evoked amongst readers.^ 
 
 1 The following, from Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 7th edition, by 
 Halliwell-Phillipps, is so characteristic a string of assertions or constructions 
 that I give it in ruU, emphasising certain words : — 
 
 "In February 1603, Roberts, one of the Shakesperian printers, attempted to 
 obtain a licence for an Impression of the play of 'Troilus and Cressida/ then in course 
 of representation by the Lord Chamberlain's servants. . . . When that printer 
 applied for a licence for the publication of the new tragedy, he had not obtained, nor 
 is there any reason for believing that he ever succeeded in procuring, the \Globe\ 
 Company's sanction to his projected speculation. At all events, Shakespeare's ' "Troilus 
 and Cressida ' was not printed until early in the year 1609, when two other publishers, 
 Bonian and Walley, having surreptitiously procured a copy, ventured on its publica- 
 tion, and, in the hope of attracting purchasers, they had the audacity to state, 
 in an unusual preface, that it had never been represented on the stage. They even 
 
MODERN GREEKS AND TROJANS 
 
 The ground-plan of the play is to combine the 
 post -Homeric story of Troilus and Cressida (which 
 was one of Chaucer's themes, and was so familiar to the 
 English as to be sung in ballads) with the Homeric 
 and post-Homeric Tale of Troy. The combination 
 had been effected already by Dekker and Chettle, in 
 their play written for Henslowe in 1599, which bore 
 originally the same name but was called Agamemnon 
 eventually. But Shakespeare worked over both subjects 
 with an altogether original and deeper purpose. The 
 Greeks and the Trojans were made real for him through 
 their respective modern counterparts : the Greeks were 
 the poets of the day, the Trojans the nobles or states- 
 men. He could give animation to his plot and witty 
 point to his dialogue by keeping before him a certain 
 group of real persons representing the chiefs of the 
 Greeks, and at least two or three real persons among 
 the Trojans. It would be fanciful to seek for actual 
 counterparts to such characters in the classical story as 
 Priam, Hecuba, Cassandra, and Andromache, on the 
 one side ; or to Calchas, perhaps even to Menelaus, on 
 the other. But it will appear that he had exact " parallel 
 lives " in view for Ajax, Thersites, Agamemnon, Nestor, 
 Ulysses, Achilles, and others among the Greeks ; and for 
 Hector, Maszs, and Troilus among the Trojans. An- 
 ticipating the reasons that can be found in the text of 
 the play for the identifications, I give them as follow : 
 
 appear to exult in having treacherously obtained a manuscript of the tragedy, but the 
 triumph of their artifices was of brief duration. The deceptive temptations they 
 offered of novelty must have been immediately exposed, and a pressure was no doubt 
 exerted upon them by the Company^ who probably withdrew their opposition on 
 payment of compensation ; for by the 28th of January the printers had received a 
 licence from the Lord Chamberlain for the publication. The preface was then 
 entirely cancelled, and the falsity of the assertion that ' Troilus and Cressida ' had 
 never been acted was conspicuously admitted by the reissue professing to appear " as 
 it loas acted by the King's Majesty's servants at the Globe " 
 
 — when, is not stated. The original statement " as it is acted by the Lord 
 Chamberlen's men," Feb. 1603, is not necessarily confirmed by a statement 
 made in 1 609 that " it was acted by the King's Majesty's servants," although 
 the two companies were continuous. The plain sense of the two editions 
 the same year is, that the first title-page and the preface were cancelled as 
 inappropriate after the play had been produced on the stage. 
 
 319 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 Dramatis Persons 
 
 Greek Side 
 
 AjAX . 
 
 Thersites . 
 
 Achilles 
 
 Ulysses 
 
 Agamemnon 
 
 Nestor 
 
 DiOMED 
 
 Patroclus . 
 Menelaus . 
 
 Ben Jonson. 
 John, Marston. 
 Shakespeare. 
 George Chapman. 
 Samuel Daniel. 
 Thomas Church- 
 yard. 
 Francis Beaumont. 
 John Fletcher. 
 Composite. 
 
 Hector 
 
 Troilus 
 
 .£neas 
 
 Antenor 
 
 Pandarus 
 
 Trojan Side 
 
 . Late Earl of Essex. 
 . Earl of Pembroke. 
 . Fulke Greville. 
 
 Sir W. Knollys ? 
 
 Composite. 
 
 The identifications of Menelaus and Pandarus are 
 perhaps possible, but not helped by any clear hint in 
 the text ; while the identification of every character is 
 out of the question, and not essential to the general 
 hypothesis. The relation between Paris and Helen 
 corresponds closely with that between Lord Mountjoy 
 and Lady Rich at the date of the play. Several traits 
 in Cressida, especially her admiration of Achilles, suggest 
 Shakespeare's quondam mistress. Mistress Fitton. The 
 parts in the Troilus and Cressida episode are the same 
 as in Chaucer, including Diomed and Antenor. Even 
 Antenor, who is not given a single line to speak in the 
 whole play, appears to have had some modern counter- 
 part in the author's mind. As the Trojan princes and 
 commanders pass by on the return from the battle, they 
 are pointed out to Cressida : 
 
 Cres. Who's that ? 
 
 Pan. That's Antenor : he has a shrewd wit, I can tell you ; 
 and he is a man good enough : he's one o' the soundest judgements 
 in Troy, whosoever, and a proper man of person. 
 
 He was taken prisoner by the Greeks (as in Chaucer), 
 and his ransom was so much an object to the Trojans 
 that they were prepared to give up a son of Priam for 
 him. It is Cressida herself who ransoms him, both in 
 the legend and in this play ; Antenor indeed is brought 
 
 320 
 
ELIZABETHAN GREEKS AND TROJANS 
 
 into Shakespeare's plot with no other object than to be 
 ransomed by the return of Cressida to her father. 
 
 The subject of the Trojan War had been brought 
 up by Chapman's translation of part of the Iliad in 
 1598. This may have been the immediate occasion of 
 Dekker and Chettle's play, Agamemnon, in 1599, which 
 has not come down in print. The separate story of 
 Troilus and Cressida was a very familiar one in ballads. 
 Thersites, also, had been introduced into English inter- 
 ludes, so as to have become proverbial for a railer. 
 Chapman, in his dedication to Lord Essex, had given a 
 hint for finding modern counterparts to the Homeric 
 heroes by comparing Essex himself with Achilles. It 
 was no great step to apply the same method to other 
 principal characters in the Tale of Troy on either side, 
 and to the respective sides. The ancient contrast of 
 Tros Tyriusve had been current in the universities at the 
 time of the Revival of Learning, the Grecians being the 
 friends of the new learning, the Trojans the conserva- 
 tives or opponents. Again, the Trojans were familiar 
 owing to the old legend of the Brute, which made the 
 first kings of England the descendants of the fugitives 
 from Troy. Elizabeth was " queen of second Troy." 
 
 The most relevant contrast, and the one that almost 
 certainly inspired Shakespeare with the main design of 
 his play, was that which Samuel Daniel had drawn out 
 in his masterly poem Musophilus, published in 1599. 
 It is in the form of a dialogue between Musophilus, 
 who represents study, art, or thought, and Philocosmus, 
 who represents action and intuitive knowledge of affairs ; 
 it is clear that Daniel himself is Musophilus, and it may 
 be inferred from a personal reference at the close, as 
 well as from incidental touches elsewhere (such as the 
 well-known passage upon Stonehenge on "the goodly 
 plain near Wilton "), that Philocosmus was his former 
 pupil, the young Lord Herbert. Out of this dialogue 
 the idea of the two camps of Greeks and Trojans, as 
 the thinkers and poets on the one side, and the soldiers 
 
 321 Y 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 and statesmen on the other, arises naturally, although 
 Daniel does not anywhere call them by those names. 
 Also in the quarrels among the scholars or the poets 
 themselves, Shakespeare would have been familiar with 
 the allegorical use of the Trojan War. The following, 
 by Gabriel Harvey, relates to a quarrel which was not 
 so much an entire Iliad as a Patrocleia, a fight over the 
 body of Robert Greene : 
 
 Here is matter enough for a new civil war, or, shall I say ? 
 for a new Trojan siege, if this poor letter should fortune to 
 come in print. I deal directly ; and I will plainly tell you my 
 fancy, if Titius continue to upbraid Caius with everything 
 and nothing. I neither name Martin Mar-Prelate, nor shame 
 Pap-with-a-hatchet, nor mention any other but Elderton and 
 Greene, two notorious mates, and the very ringleaders of the 
 rhyming and scribbling crew. But Titius, or rather Zoilus 
 in his spiteful vein, will so long flurt at Homer ; and Thersites 
 in his peevish mood so long iling at Agamemnon, that they 
 will become extremely odious and intolerable to all good learn- 
 ing and civil government ; attempting to pull down or disgrace 
 others without order, must needs finally overthrow themselves 
 without relief 
 
 Assuming that Shakespeare's idea in his dramatic 
 treatment of the Tale of Troy was to make the Greeks 
 the poets and the Trojans the men of affairs, it does not 
 follow that he intended to carry the allegory into every 
 detail of the action ; it would have been, indeed, im- 
 possible to do so. The legendary action must be 
 followed, with such modifications as could be made in 
 it without marring it ; and the allegory of two hostile 
 camps used only for the sake of a natural division, on 
 either side of which there was scope for witty and 
 pointed characterisation of the protagonists. The 
 greatest difficulty was the slaying of Hector, which 
 has been managed by Shakespeare with much ingenuity, 
 but in such a way as to have brought upon him the 
 severest of all the condemnations passed upon his play. 
 
 32? 
 
THE POETS AS THE GREEKS 
 
 Thersites 
 
 Coming to the marks of identity first amongst the 
 Greeks, or the poets, the character that at once makes 
 one suspicious of some private intention is Thersites. 
 He had become proverbial as a railer from the brief 
 sketch of him in the second book of the Iliad — a 
 hunchback with a squint, a peaked forehead, a few 
 scanty tufts of wool on his head, and a deformity of 
 the feet, who rails at Agamemnon and gets a beating 
 from Ulysses. That is the original ground of the 
 notoriety of Thersites, and all that Shakespeare found 
 about him in Chapman's Iliad. Thersites did not 
 occur at all in the post-Homeric accretions to the 
 Tale of Troy, such as he found in Ovid (Metam. xiv.) 
 and in Chaucer and Lydgate. He makes him, for his 
 own reasons, a follower of Ajax, who beats him (it is 
 Ulysses who beats him in the original), so that he goes 
 ofF to join himself to Achilles ; moreover, it is the 
 desertion of Ajax by Thersites, at the instance of 
 Achilles, that is given as the ground of quarrel between 
 those two leaders of the Greeks. Further, Thersites 
 is made a bastard, while a bastard son of Priam, 
 Margareton, is introduced from the post- Homeric 
 legends for no other purpose than to elicit the bastardy 
 of Thersites, for which there is no classical authority. 
 He does not make him a hunchback, nor advert to his 
 squint, or his misshapen head, or his scanty tufts of 
 wool ; but brings out certain other physical peculiarities, 
 chiefly the disproportion. between his legs and his body. 
 
 One phrase used of him — 
 
 When rank Thersites opes his mastic jaws — 
 
 has arrested the attention of two writers, Mr. Fleay 
 and the late Mr. R. Simpson. The former thought 
 that " mastic," which is an obvious coinage, was taken 
 from the name of Dekker's play Satiromastix, the Whip 
 of Satires, and that Thersites was Dekker, a man whom 
 
 323 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 Ben Jonson called " a very simple honest fellow," 
 who was as little a railer as any writer of the time. 
 Simpson guessed that Marston was meant by the 
 " mastic jaws" ; and as there was another comedy with 
 a name ending in " mastic," namely Hisiriomastix, 
 or the Whip of Players, which bears the date of 
 1611 and no author's name, he assumed that Marston 
 was the author, and that it must have been produced 
 originally about the end of Elizabeth's reign, or before 
 the date of 'Troilus and Cressida.' There is not a 
 particle of evidence upon which to ground either of 
 those assumptions, and there is no need for them. 
 John Marston is certainly the railer meant by Thersites ; 
 but his " mastic jaws " come from the name " Therio- 
 mastix," or Whip of Beasts, by which he subscribes 
 himself, in large capitals, at the end of one of the 
 sections of his satires, The Scourge of Villany (1599). 
 The idea of the Whip of Beasts is carried out consist- 
 ently in Thersites, for he is made to draw his vituper- 
 ative comparisons of mankind (including himself) from 
 all the great divisions of the animal kingdom and from 
 many diiFerent species. Marston was the chief railer 
 of his time. As Minto says of him, " he rails, and then 
 rails at himself for railing ; pours forth torrents of 
 abuse upon the objects of his dislike . . . and then 
 vituperates himself no less roundly as a vile, snarling, 
 canker-eaten, rusty cur. . . . He has been stigmatised 
 as the most filthy and scurrilous writer of his time. 
 To the first of these epithets Marston has some claim, 
 but to call him scurrilous conveys an imputation of ill- 
 nature which would be most undeserved." Whether 
 Thersites deserves to be called scurrilous is hardly 
 open to question ; but certainly he resembles Marston 
 in vituperating himself; Thus, he proclaims his own 
 bastardy : 
 
 Ther. What art thou ? 
 
 Mar. A bastard son of Priam's. 
 
 Tier. I am a bastard too ; I love bastards ; I am a bastard 
 
 324 
 
MARSTON AS THERSITES 
 
 begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valour, iii every- 
 thing illegitimate. One bear will not bite another, and wherefore 
 should one bastard ? 
 
 Ben Jonson, in The Poetaster, which he " wrote upon " 
 Marstori, had already hinted at something irregular in 
 the latter 's pedigree, Crispinus, who is Marston, meets 
 Horace, or Ben Jonson, in the Via Sacra, and fastens 
 upon him like a bur. Horace, after enduring him for 
 a time, at length turns to him with the bland question : 
 
 Hor. Is your mother living, sir ? 
 
 Crisp. Au ! convert my thoughts to somewhat else, I pray 
 thee. 
 
 Hor. You have much of the mother in you, sir. Your father 
 is dead ? 
 
 Crisp. Ay, I thank Jove, and my grandfather too, and all my 
 kinsfolks, and well composed in their urns. 
 
 Marston's "little legs" (see antea, p. 273) appear to 
 be pointed at in the epithets applied to Thersites — 
 " cobloaf," " toadstool," " stool for a witch " ; and 
 perhaps his appearance in general in the epithets 
 "fragment," "indistinguishable cur," and "ruinous 
 butt." Jonson "had many quarrels with him, beat 
 him, and took his pistol from him," so that Marston 
 on one occasion went over to the side of Shakespeare 
 and assisted in answering The Poetaster by Satiro- 
 mastix ; which corresponds with the incident of Ajax 
 beating Thersites, and the defection of the latter to 
 the service of Achilles. In the dialogue between Ulysses 
 and Nestor (II. iii. 99) this change of allegiance is made 
 much of : 
 
 Nest. What moves Ajax thus to bay at him [Achilles] ? 
 
 U/yss. Achilles hath inveigled his fool from him. 
 
 Nest. Who, Thersites ? 
 
 U/yss. He. 
 
 Nest. Then will Ajax lack matter if he have lost his argument. 
 [Marston was the subject or occasion of Jonson's Poetaster.] 
 
 U/yss. No, you see, Ae is his argument that has his argument. 
 
 Nest. All the better ; their fraction is more our wish than 
 their faction : but it was a strong composure a fool could disunite ! 
 
 U/yss. The amity that wisdom knits not, folly may easily untie. 
 325 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 This is an important revelation of the immediate 
 occasion of the quarrel between Ben Jonson (Ajax) and 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 Another means of identifying Marston as Thersites 
 is to discover puns upon his name. Marston is not an 
 easy name to pun upon. Ben Jonson tried it in The 
 Poetaster, with indifferent success — the heraldic device 
 of a bloody toe, " Mars his toe." Shakespeare's 
 attempts appear to be two in number, the first where 
 Thersites exclaims, after Ajax has beaten him, " Mars 
 his idiot ! do, rudeness ; do, camel " (which is like 
 " Mars of malcontents " — the Malcontent being one of 
 Marston's plays — in ' The Merry Wives of Windsor '). 
 The second, a more elaborate attempt, is in the speech 
 by Ulysses upon Ajax (Ben Jonson) : 
 
 Praise him that got thee, she that gave thee suck ; 
 Famed be thy tutor, and thy parts of nature 
 Thrice famed, beyond all erudition : 
 But he that disciplined thy arms to fight. 
 Let Mars divide eternity in twain. 
 And give him half. 
 
 The two last lines are recognised by all the comment- 
 ators to be nonsense ; their raison d'Stre is the pun 
 upon the bisected name of Marston — the best that 
 could be done, better than Jonson's "Mars his toe." 
 His Christian name. Jack, is perhaps the explanation 
 of another mysterious epithet applied to him by Ajax 
 — " Mistress Thersites," the mistress being another 
 name for the jack at bowls. These are the relaxations 
 of mighty minds — dulce est desipere in loco. 
 
 Ajax 
 
 Ajax is the only one of the Homeric heroes who is 
 made ridiculous in ' Troilus and Cressida.* The ridicule 
 has been defended on the ground that, in Homer, 
 
 326 
 
BEN JONSON AS AJAX 
 
 Ulysses could never see Ajax without laughing ; but 
 of course Homer does not make a butt of him. It is 
 the habitual treatment of Ajax in this play that has led 
 to the idea, of Gervinus and others, that Shakespeare 
 meant to ridicule Homer or the Trojan war. But there 
 is no lack of dignity in any of the chiefs, excepting 
 Ajax ; and in some of them there is more dignity 
 than Homer allows them. For example, Shakespeare's 
 Achilles has no personal quarrel with Agamemnon, but 
 always treats the King of Men with the politeness due 
 to his titular rank. In like manner Ulysses, the 
 sagacious monitor both of the Greek chiefs in council 
 and of Achilles in private, is given some of the best 
 verse to speak that Shakespeare ever wrote. Nor is 
 old Nestor handled with less gentle humour than by 
 Homer himself. He follows Homer closely also in 
 all those scenes of the three first Acts which are taken 
 from Chapman's Iliad so far as it was then translated, 
 being quite Homeric in spirit in the council of the 
 Greek chiefs, in the corresponding council of Priam 
 and his sons, in the challenge of Hector, in the choosing 
 of Ajax by lot to meet him, and in the deputation of 
 the other Greek chiefs to Achilles. But for the 
 extreme licence allowed to Thersites, it is Ajax, and 
 Ajax alone, who is un-Homeric. To get over that 
 striking innovation, Malone supposed that Shakespeare 
 had confused the Telamonian Ajax with the other Ajax, 
 whom he would have found in Lydgate as a big 
 blustering fellow. Possibly that was the suggestion ; 
 or the joke upon the name (a-Jakes), as in the Nine 
 Worthies' play in ' Love's Labour's Lost,' may have 
 suggested this hero as the most suitable to his private 
 purpose. But it is clear that he did not inadvertently 
 describe the wrong man ; for he takes from Lydgate 
 himself a special mark of the son of Telamon, namely, 
 that Ajax was half a Trojan, being the son of that 
 sister of Priam who was carried off by Hercules and 
 given in marriage to Telamon — " my sacred aunt," as 
 
 327 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 Hector reminds Ajax when he ceases fighting to recall 
 kinship. 
 
 The identity of Ajax with Ben Jonson is involved 
 in the identity of Thersites with Marston, being the 
 same scenic partnership as of Stephano and Trinculo 
 in ' The Tempest.' The alliance between the two 
 existed in fact, and had the same vicissitudes as in the 
 two plays. Jonson is characterised best in the following 
 description of Ajax delivered to Cresslda before he 
 appears on the scene : 
 
 Alex. This man, lady, hath robbed many beasts of their parti- 
 cular additions [their distinctive qualities] : he is as valiant as the 
 lion, churlish as the bear, slow as the elephant ; a man into whom 
 nature hath so crowrded humours, that his valour is crushed into 
 folly, his folly sauced vyith discretion : there is no man hath a virtue 
 that he hath not a glimpse of, nor any man an attaint but he carries 
 some stain of it ; he is melancholy without cause, and merry against 
 the hair ; he hath the joints of everything, but everything so out of 
 joint that he is a gouty Briareus, many hands and no use, or purblind 
 Argus, all eyes and no sight. 
 
 This is Shakespeare upon Ben Jonson, which may be 
 compared with Pope upon Addison : 
 
 Who would not laugh if such a man there be ? 
 Who would not weep if Atticus were he ? 
 
 I shall not attempt a detailed proof that Ajax is Ben 
 Jonson. In my opinion, the idea has only to be enter- 
 tained to be assented to, in reading the scenes between 
 Ajax and Thersites, and the great scene in which the 
 other Greek chiefs "draw" Ajax by flattering him at the 
 expense of Achilles, The likeness will be recognised 
 by those who will recognise it, and will be denied by 
 those who will deny it, assent in such a matter being 
 essentially subjective, and conditional upon a general 
 willingness to see an allegorical purpose in the play as 
 a whole. Credence would depend, further, on the 
 acceptance of the corresponding reading of Stephano 
 and Trinculo in ' The Tempest.' The objective point 
 
 328 
 
SHAKESPEARE AS ACHILLES 
 
 common to both is the beating, which is a historical 
 fact in the relations between Ben Jonson and Marston. 
 
 Achilles 
 
 Achilles can be identified with Shakespeare himself 
 by means of a number of points not to be found in 
 Homer or in Lydgate's post-Homeric legend. The 
 chief departure from Homer is, that Achilles has no 
 quarrel with Agamemnon on account of Briseis, and is 
 never angry with him ; the wrath of Achilles is changed 
 in its very root. He keeps his tent for " strong reasons," 
 two of which are elicited by Ulysses. The first i§, 
 that the Greeks have not observed degrees of merit in 
 giving the leadership to Agamemnon : Achilles is the 
 real leader, and he ought to be recognised as such. 
 The second is a very strange reason. The circumstance 
 is not altogether invented by Shakespeare, having a 
 basis in the post-Homeric legend that Achilles was in 
 love with Polyxena, a daughter of Priam and Hecuba, 
 which might have been found in the 13th Book of 
 Ovid's Metamorphoses (Golding's translation, 1586). 
 Ulysses surprises Achilles by his knowledge of the fact : 
 
 JJlyss. 'Tis known, Achilles, that you are in love 
 With one of Priam's daughters. 
 
 Achil. Ha ! known ! 
 
 XJlyss. Is that a wonder ? 
 The providence that's in a watchful state 
 Knows almost every grain of Plutus' 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 expressure to. 
 All the commerce that you have had with Troy 
 As perfectly is ours as yours, my lord. . . . 
 Farewell, my lord : I as your lover speak : 
 The fool slides o'er the ice that you should break. 
 
 329 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 The story of the fool and the ice came from Evesham, 
 and was told first in print in 1600, by Robert Armin, 
 afterwards one of Shakespeare's fellow- actors. The 
 Evesham natural became so fond of the clown in a 
 strolling company of players that he wanted to go 
 off with them. He was prevented, but was allowed to 
 watch them from the window of the Hart Inn until 
 they were across the Avon on the road to Pershore. 
 As soon as he was left alone, he dropped from the 
 window, and, to the amazement of every one, made 
 straight for the frozen river, crossing it swiftly on the 
 thin ice and joining the players on the other side. This 
 is a story of the Avon and of a company of players ; 
 but that does not exhaust Shakespeare's personal interest 
 in it. It is put into the mouth of Ulysses to point the 
 moral of his own skating upon thin ice in his amour 
 with a lady of the Court. 
 
 It may be thought that Shakespeare need not have 
 been surprised at his love-affair being known, inasmuch 
 as two of the sonnets, in which it is declared most 
 plainly, were printed as his in 1599 in a poetical mis- 
 cellany, having been given to the editor probably by 
 some one who had a sinister motive. It does not 
 follow, however, that the identity of the lady, and her 
 high station, were known at that time. It is clear 
 from the unprinted ballad of 1601, among the State 
 Papers, which I have cited already, that the lines upon 
 the fall of Mistress Fitton, the "White Doe — 
 
 Pembrooke strook her down 
 And took her from the clown — 
 
 can only mean that she had been the mistress of a 
 player before she became Lord Pembroke's mistress, 
 and that the fact was known to the writer of the ballad, 
 who was almost certainly old Churchyard, the poet. 
 But the ballad was private, and Churchyard might have 
 known more than most, inasmuch as he was about the 
 Court, being known as " the old Court poet." 
 
 330 
 
SHAKESPEARE AS ACHILLES 
 
 Something more is heard of the secret love of 
 AchilUes for the daughter of Priam. Queen Hecuba 
 and Polyxena herself jointly send him a letter to remind 
 him of a pledge that he had given them not to fight 
 with Hector, He reads the letter, and then says to 
 Patroclus : 
 
 An oath that I have sworn. I will not break it. 
 Fall Greeks, fail fame, honour or go or stay. 
 My major vow lies here, this I'll obey. 
 
 Partly on account of this secret love-afFair, and partly 
 on account of his being inferior in titular rank to 
 Agamemnon, Achilles keeps his tent. He spends his 
 time lolling on his bed, listening to Patroclus as he 
 mimics the several Greek chiefs, applauding with deep- 
 chested laughter. Ulysses, in the world-renowned speech, 
 " Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back," warns him 
 that he must not rest upon his laurels won, but keep 
 himself still in evidence by fresh achievements. Who- 
 ever Ulysses is meant for, Shakespeare assigns to him 
 a very honourable and friendly disposition towards 
 himself, permitting him to probe his own weaknesses 
 to the bottom. Ulysses does not spare Achilles, who 
 is represented as unsociable, and as eating his heart 
 out in wounded pride. That Shakespeare fell into 
 unsociable ways, after the slight put upon him or the 
 set made against him when he was kept out of the 
 poet-laureateship, is made probable by a supposed 
 reference to him in Jack Drums Entertainment (1601). 
 Fuller, indeed, wrote of certain wit-combats between 
 him and Ben Jonson ; and these are supposed to have 
 taken place at those convivial gatherings of the poets 
 at the Mermaid tavern in Bread Street, Cheapside, 
 which are the subject of the lines by Beaumont 
 addressed to Ben Jonson. But Beaumont mentions no 
 names besides Jonson's ; and as to Fuller's authority, 
 it was one or two generations later, and he is other- 
 wise very inadequate for Shakespeare's biography. The 
 
 331 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 Jack Drum play grew out of the quarrel among 
 the poets, to which Jonson's Poetaster and Dekker's 
 Satiromastix were contributions, and it is of the same 
 date as those. One of the characters is an eminent 
 poet, Planet, so called because the ladies were planet- 
 struck by him. As he has been identified with 
 Shakespeare (by Simpson and others), the following 
 speech of his has an interest as confirming the parable 
 of the unsociable Achilles : "I loved but three things 
 in the world : Philosophie, thrift, and myselfe. Thou 
 hast made me hate philosophie, a usurer's greasy 
 codpiece made me loathe thrift ; but if all the brewers' 
 jades in the town can drag me from love of myselfe, 
 they shall do more than e'er the seven wise men of 
 Greece could. Come, come now. I'll be as sociable 
 as Timon of Athens." An exaggerated self-esteem is 
 highly characteristic of Shakespeare's Achilles. Whilst 
 he is described as " unsociable," and as slighted by his 
 fellows (in one significant scene, in which they all 
 "cut" him by previous arrangement among them- 
 selves), he has not " fallen out with fortune " ; it is 
 not with him as with ebbing men : 
 
 But 'tis not so with me : 
 Fortune and I are friends ; I do enjoy 
 At ample point all that I did possess 
 Save these men's looks. 
 
 This is exactly the situation of Prospero (and the 
 meaning of his name), notwithstanding his exile for 
 twelve years in a desert island ; Fortune was " now my 
 dear lady." If it be not Shakespeare's own case, we 
 should have to find some reason why Achilles, the 
 princely leader of the Myrmidons, should emphasise 
 the fact that he was " not fallen out with fortune." 
 
 There are many other things said of Achilles which 
 have no meaning except as true of a modern counter- 
 part. One of these, II. iii. 196, is a plain hint of the 
 extent to which Shakespeare realised his dramatic 
 situations by paraphrasing his own experiences : 
 
 332 
 
DANIEL AS AGAMEMNON 
 
 And never suffers matter of the world 
 Enter his thoughts, save such as do revolve 
 And ruminate himself. 
 
 The complement to it is the complaint of Ulysses, I. iii. 
 197, against Achilles and Patroclus (Fletcher), that 
 they rated studious toil beneath effective action (in 
 playwrights' work) : 
 
 Ulyss. 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 hands shall striice 
 When fitness calls them on, and know by measure 
 Of their observant toil the enemies' weight, — 
 Why this hath not a finger's dignity : 
 They call this bed-work, mappery, closet-war ; 
 So that the ram that batters down the wall. 
 For the great swing and rudeness of his poise, 
 They place before his hand that made the engine. 
 Or those that with the fineness of their souls 
 By reason guide his execution. 
 
 Nest. Let this be granted, and Achilles' horse 
 Makes many Thetis' sons. 
 
 Agamemnon 
 
 The identification of Agamemnon with an actual 
 person (Samuel Daniel) is suggested, as in the other 
 instances, by certain non-Homeric touches, which must 
 have had a motive and a precise meaning in the modern 
 author's mind. Achilles has no personal quarrel with 
 Agamemnon ; but the latter, presiding over the council 
 of the Greek chiefs, is given a broad hint by Ulysses 
 that the real reason for the apathy of the Greeks, and 
 for the slack state of the war, is his own incompetence. 
 The great speech on the need for observing degrees of 
 merit in the State, includes a significant mention of 
 " laurels " in the same line with " crowns " and 
 " sceptres." Daniel was not the Poet Laureate with a 
 full title ; but it is hardly doubtful that he was in the 
 
 333 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 place of the Laureate, and that he was used as a 
 stop-gap to keep Shakespeare out. No one in the 
 play treats Agamemnon otherwise than respectfully ; 
 even Thersites says that he is " an honest fellow enough, 
 and one that loves quails, but he has not so much 
 brain as ear-wax." Daniel loved his ease, and enjoyed 
 it in a garden-house in " Old Street, nigh London," 
 where he would be obscure for months at a time, 
 receiving the visits of his friends Camden, Donne, 
 and other scholars. He himself ascribed his ease and 
 comfort to the bounty of Elizabeth {supra, p. 41). 
 He produced little after his Musophilus of 1599, and 
 nothing of the same quality as the Rosamond and 
 Civil Wars of his earlier period, although he survived 
 Shakespeare two or three years. Thersites points also 
 to his non-productiveness in a very enigmatic speech, 
 of which the metaphors are all taken from the plague : 
 
 Ther. Agamemnon, how if he had boils ? full all over, 
 generally ? And those boils did run, say so. Did not the general 
 run then ? Were not that a botchy core ? Then would come some 
 matter from him; I see none now. 
 
 The running or rendering of a plague -boil or botch 
 was always a hopeful sign. 
 
 The most delicate satire of Agamemnon is in the 
 scene where ^neas arrives at his tent to deliver the 
 challenge of Hector ; he is actually face to face with 
 the King of Men and is addressing him, but he fails to 
 recognise him, and needs an amusing number of broad 
 hints from Agamemnon himself before he discovers 
 who it is that he is talking to. Taking ^neas to be 
 Fulke Greville, there is a special point in his non- 
 recognition of Daniel as the crowned king of poetry. 
 On the other hand, when vEneas first meets Achilles, he 
 is at no loss : 
 
 Mne. If not Achilles, sir. 
 
 What is your name ? 
 
 Achil. If not Acbilks, nothing. 
 
 .Mne. Therefore Achilles, 
 
 334 
 
CHAPMAN AS ULYSSES 
 
 In like manner Hector, when he arrives in the Grecian 
 camp, has the following dialogue with Ajax : 
 
 Ajax. Great Agamemnon comes to meet us here. 
 
 Hect. The worthiest of them tell me name by name ; 
 But for Achilles, mine own searching eyes 
 Shall find him by his large and portly size. 
 
 Ulysses 
 
 There are two or three subtle touches in the part of 
 Ulysses from which it may be argued that Shakespeare 
 intended that very fine part for George Chapman, upon 
 whose translation of the Iliad much of his play was 
 based. The chief hint is given in the scene where 
 Ulysses (Chapman) meets Hector (Lord Essex) : 
 
 Hect. I know your favour. Lord Ulysses, well. 
 Ah, sir, there's many a Greek and Trojan dead. 
 Since first I saw yourself and Diomed 
 In Ilion, on your Greekish embassy. 
 
 Vlyss. Sir, I foretold you then what would ensue : 
 My prophecy is but half his journey yet ; 
 For yonder walls, etc. 
 
 It was not true that only half the time had elapsed 
 from the beginning of the siege to the fall of Troy. 
 In Homer the war is in its ninth year (ii. 295) and 
 the end is near. In ' Troilus and Cressida,' for some 
 reason, only seven years of the siege have passed, 
 according to the speech of Agamemnon at the coimcil 
 (I. iii. 12), although the incidents that follow are those of 
 the ninth and tenth years according to classical tradition. 
 When Ulysses says to Hector that his "prophecy is 
 but half his journey yet," this is Chapman dedicating 
 to Lord Essex the first part of his translation of the 
 Iliad. The volume dedicated to Lord Essex in 1598 
 contained only seven books down to the eleventh 
 (omitting iii.-vi.), but both the dedication and the 
 preface to the reader contained the promise of the rest 
 of the first twelve " in the next edition." When the 
 round dozen at length came out, the edition bore no 
 
 335 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 date ; but, as it is dedicated to Prince Henry, it must 
 have been after the accession of King James. At all 
 events, the translation dedicated to Essex covered 
 nearly all the first half of the Iliad, with a promise 
 that the omissions would be supplied. Certainly 
 Chapman took a long time to complete the Iliad ; it 
 had not been completed in 1609, when 'Troilus and 
 Cressida'was printed, and probably not until 16 12. 
 The whole of the Odyssey followed in two years 
 thereafter. Hector, or Lord Essex, knows his favour 
 well, and reminds him of the long time that had passed 
 since he saw him first on his "Greekish embassy" — 
 his epistle dedicatory of 1598 ; and Ulysses, that is to 
 say, Chapman, answers that his " prophecy " is only 
 half run even now, but that Troy was certainly destined 
 to fall. 
 
 If this hypothetical reading of pleasant badinage 
 over Chapman's long-delayed completion of his Iliads 
 be thought a slight proof of his identity with Ulysses, 
 the next proof will be thought slighter. Ulysses 
 imparts to Nestor a deep design, to the end that Ajax, 
 and not Achilles, shall fight with Hector : 
 
 Ulyss. Therefore 'tis meet Achilles meet not Hector ; 
 Let us, like merchants, show our foulest wares, 
 And think, perchance they'll sell. 
 
 But these artifices are not practised by merchants, 
 certainly not by Shakespeare's merchants of the Rialto ; 
 they are the artifices of chapmen. There is a pun in 
 the first line ("meet"), and it is probable that the 
 pun which would have been made upon Chapman's 
 name by the correct word is really implied by using an 
 incorrect one in its place. That he ought to have 
 written " chapmen " may be inferred from the actual 
 use of that word in its correct sense and in the same 
 figure of speech in the conversation between Diomed 
 and Paris on the subject of the latter's adulterous 
 relations with Helen : 
 
 33<S 
 
CHAPMAN AS ULYSSES 
 
 Par. Fair Diomed, you do as chapmen do, 
 Dispraise the thing that you desire to buy ; 
 But we in silence hold this virtue well. 
 We'll but commend what we intend to sell. 
 
 There is a third possible reference to Chapman, as 
 Ulysses, in his character of translator, probably also as 
 the author of the idea, in Byron's Conspiracy, that the 
 measure of our merits is the opinion of others. Ulysses 
 is conversing amicably with Achilles, as one philosophic 
 mind with another : 
 
 Vlyss. A strange fellow here 
 
 Writes me : " That man, how dearly ever parted, 
 How'much in having, or without or in. 
 Cannot make boast to have that which he hath. 
 Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection ; 
 As when his virtues shining upon others 
 Heat them, and they retort that heat again 
 To the first giver." 
 
 jicAi/. This is not strange, Ulysses, etc. 
 
 The " strange fellow's " style is made purposely involved 
 and obscure ; it is a good-natured parody of Chapman's 
 own prose style, the warmth and sincerity of which 
 make up for its uncouthness. Chapman's two dedicatory 
 letters to Lord Essex are full of such gnomic conceits, 
 none of them less complex than the idea which is 
 discussed with so pleasing an urbanity between Achilles 
 and Ulysses. This fine passage is in Shakespeare's 
 natural manner, not only the style but also the thought, 
 excepting that the style of the sentence read from the 
 book of the "strange fellow" is made uncouth like 
 Chapman's, as if to remind him wittily that he is the 
 honey-tongued Ulysses only when his friend writes his 
 speeches for him. 
 
 The other Greek chiefs are Menelaus, Patroclus, 
 Diomed, and Nestor. Of these I do not profess to 
 be able to identify a Menelaus among the poets of the 
 time. On him Thersites exhausts his scurrility ; and 
 he is treated with coldness by every one. He may 
 be merely the brief abstract of a cuckold, or he may be 
 
 337 z 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 meant for a real person, whose poetic distinction could 
 hardly have been of the first or second rank. When 
 speaking of the character of Parolles, I showed that 
 Barnabe Barnes had been made the subject of a 
 remarkably plain epigram by Campion in the preceding 
 year (1602), in which his domestic economy is ex- 
 hibited as controlled and kept going by Gabriel 
 Harvey ; which may be the meaning of Thersites' dark 
 enigma on cuckold Menelaus : "a thrifty shoeing- 
 horn in a chain, hanging at his brother's leg." 
 
 Patroclus 
 
 The graphic sketch of Patroclus amusing Achilles by 
 mimicking the other Greek chiefs has no warrant, of 
 course, in Homer, nor anywhere but in Shakespeare's 
 private thought ; just as it is un-Homeric to show us 
 Achilles lolling on his bed (in Homer he extemporises 
 verses to the music of the harp). Patroclus was 
 evidently some one much in Shakespeare's company at 
 that time. It is Thersites, as usual, who is allowed to 
 characterise him in scurrilous language : "thou idle 
 immaterial skein of sleave-silk, thou green sarcenet flap 
 for a sore eye, thou tassel of a prodigal's purse. . . . 
 Heaven bless thee from a tutor, and discipline come 
 not near thee ! Let thy blood be thy direction till thy 
 death." There are various reasons for thinking that 
 John Fletcher is the most likely of the poets to have 
 been intimate with Shakespeare about the date of this 
 play. The large volume of work which bears his 
 name, in conjunction partly with Beaumont's, does not 
 begin until 1605-6 ; yet he had been in London for 
 some years before that, and he is most probably the 
 Fletcher who is mentioned in Henslowe's Diary, about 
 the years 1596-93, as having been "fetched" by an 
 actor, Martin Slaughter, and having had money 
 transmitted to him by the same Martin, whose name 
 is connected mysteriously with a group of plays 
 
 338 
 
FLETCHER AND BEAUMONT 
 
 {Hercules, Pythagoras, Focaise, and Alexander and 
 Lodowick). He was certainly joint -author with 
 Shakespeare of The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably also 
 of ' Henry VIII.' ; but there is no external clue 
 to the date of their collaboration : it is not at all 
 likely to have been after 1605-6-7, when Fletcher 
 began to produce voluminously on his own account 
 and in conjunction with Beaumont ; while the curious 
 resemblance of the gaoler's daughter in The Two Noble 
 Kinsmen to Ophelia points to a date about 1602-3. 
 The most direct reason for identifying him with 
 Patroclus is a speech (III. iii. 2 16) by the latter, of which 
 both the argument and the allusions suggest the more 
 usual motto of the Fletchers, Martis non Cupidinis — 
 " of Mars, not of Cupid " (although it was not a very 
 suitable motto for John Fletcher) : 
 
 Patr. To this effect, Achilles, have I moved you. 
 A woman impudent and mannish grown. 
 Is not more loathed than an effeminate man 
 In time of action. I stand condemn'd for this : 
 They think my little stomach to the war. 
 And your great love to me, restrains you thus : 
 Sweet, rouse yourself ; and the weak wanton Cupid 
 Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold, 
 And, like a dew-drop from the lion's mane. 
 Be shook to air. 
 
 It was quite in Shakespeare's manner to play upon 
 heraldic mottoes and arms, as I have shown for the 
 Pembroke heraldry in the Sonnets, and will show at 
 once for the Beaumont motto and crest. 
 
 DiOMED 
 
 The part of Diomed is taken exactly from Chaucer's 
 Creseid. He is deputed by the Greek commander to 
 go to Troy and bring back Cressida in exchange for 
 the captured Antenor, whereupon he becomes the lover 
 of Cressida and the supplanter of Troilus. It was open 
 to Shakespeare to have left this traditional lover of 
 
 339 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 Cresslda without an actual counterpart like the other 
 Greek chiefs ; but he has not done so. Diomed is 
 distinguished as one of the poets by two marks in the 
 text, both of which are ingenious. The first is his gait, 
 as described by Ulysses : 
 
 Agam. Is not yond Diomed, with Calchas' daughter ? 
 
 Vlyss. 'Tis he, I ken the manner of his gait ; 
 He rises on the toe ; that spirit of his 
 In aspiration lifts him from the earth. 
 
 There is probably no classical warrant for giving Diomed 
 an elastic or springy step, although " rises on the toe " 
 is highly characteristic of certain figures on antique 
 marbles ; moreover, it is characteristic more or less of 
 every one's walk. As a distinguishing mark of Diomed 
 it is almost certainly taken from the Beaumont motto, 
 Erectus non elatus, which is turned into a witty com- 
 pliment to the most distinguished member of a 
 distinguished family : " that spirit of his in aspiration 
 lifts him from the earth." The same play upon 
 heraldry is found in the address of Troilus to Diomed 
 when he is to fight with him on the morrow for the 
 revolted Cressida : 
 
 Troil. Farewell, revolted fair ! and, Diomed, 
 Stand fast, and wear a castle on thy head. 
 
 " Stand fast " looks like another motto ; and the castle 
 was one of the Beaumont crests : " An elephant sur- 
 mounted with a tower triple, towered argent." War- 
 burton has pointed out that " castle " was sometimes 
 used for a closed helmet or casque ; in Urry's Chaucer 
 Sir Thopas is represented with a castle by way of 
 crest to his helmet. Steevens took the meaning of 
 Troilus to be : " defend thy head with armour of more 
 than common security." But the advice must have 
 had some witty point, or it would not have been given 
 by Troilus in that form.^ 
 
 1 There is more than one piece of evidence in ' Troilus and Cressida ' 
 that Shakespeare had just been reading Beaumont's Salmacis and Hermaphm- 
 
 340 
 
CHURCHYARD AS NESTOR 
 
 Nestor 
 
 There was a real old Nestor among the Elizabethan 
 poets — Thomas Churchyard. He had been often in 
 the wars, and had written much curious verse as well, 
 ever since the time of Henry VIII., having been 
 originally in the service of the Earl of Surrey, and 
 associated with him in a volume of Songs and Sonnets 
 which was long popular. He was a spirited old gentle- 
 man of breeding and education, with a caustic wit and 
 a keen sense of probity.^ Spenser mentions him both 
 in Colin Clout and in The Faerie dueene ; he is named 
 among the poets by Meres (1598), and by several 
 others in such terms as to show that he held a prominent 
 place in the literary world of his day. At the date of 
 •Troilus and Cressida' (1603) he was about eighty- 
 three years old, and still writing, one of his latest pieces 
 being a welcome to James I. Not only is he the most 
 obvious modern counterpart of Nestor, but there is 
 actually a play upon the name of Churchyard, where 
 Thersites speaks of " Old Nestor, whose wit was mouldy 
 ere your grandsires had nails on their toes." " The 
 mouldiness, be it noted, is said of his " wit," which is 
 one of those not unfrequent slips in this play, betraying 
 
 ditus, published anonymously in 1602 ; so that, despite his youth, he would 
 have been reckoned among the poets at the date of the play. The re- 
 semblance between the two following passages is very close : 
 
 Pan. But to prove to you that Helen loves him [Troilus] j she came and puts 
 me her white hand to his cloven chin — 
 
 Cra. Juno have mercy ! how came it cloven ? 
 
 Pan. Why, you Icnow 'tis dimpled ! I think his smiling becomes him better 
 than any man in all Phrygia. 
 
 Beaumont's identical notion, the year before, is : 
 
 Then did she lift her hand unto his chin, 
 And praised the pretty dimpling of his skin j 
 But straight his chin she 'gan to overslip, 
 When she beheld the redness of his lip. 
 
 1 See the original biography by H. W. Adnitt, of Shrewsbury, in Trans. 
 Shrops. Archaol. and 'flat. Hist. Society, Oswestry (1880). 
 
 * There is a similar joke upon Churchyard's name in The Return from 
 Parnassus. 
 
 341 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 Shakespeare's private thought of poets all the while 
 that he is writing of warriors. Nestor's meeting with 
 Hector is also worded appropriately to Churchyard : 
 
 I knew thy grandsire. 
 And once fought with him ; he was a soldier good. 
 
 Lord Essex's grandsire was Sir Francis KnoUys, upon 
 whom Churchyard wrote a eulogy on his death in 1576 ; 
 he fought with him, but not necessarily against him, 
 the ambiguity being required by the fact that Nestor 
 and Hector were in opposite camps. If it be said that 
 Shakespeare had no need to have any one in his mind in 
 delineating so proverbial a personage as old Nestor, yet 
 how intelligible become the following lines if we assume 
 a twinkle of humour and a genuine impulse of affection 
 at the thought of old Churchyard in the author's mind 
 as he penned them : 
 
 Let me embrace thee, thou good old chronicle, 
 That hast so long wallc'd hand in hand with Time. 
 
 The poor old gentleman died in 1 604, a fortnight after 
 a sad accident that befell him in the presence at Court, 
 from which he was " faynt to be carried out." ^ 
 
 1 Gaudy Letters, Hist. MSS. Commiss. Report, vii. (i) 528. It is not 
 improbable that we may have, in one of the best-known passages of ' Hamlet,* 
 traces of the original and racy imagination of Churchyard. It is the speech 
 in two parts from .Eneas' Tale to Dido, professedly taken from a play but 
 once acted because " it pleased not the million." Hamlet " chiefly loved " 
 this speech, which the strolling player was asked to give as " a taste of his 
 quality." Then follow the slaughter of Priam by Pyrrhus, and the distrac- 
 tion of Hecuba, in Shakespeare's own grandest rhythm and swing, so filled 
 with tragic pathos that the actor himself is moved to tears. It is clear that 
 there is no source for this in the Siueen Dido of Marlowe and Nash (1594), 
 nor in the original, the second book of the ^neid, so far as concerns the 
 suggestion of details. But Churchyard mentions in one of his prefeces 
 (1602) that he had an unpublished work which he calls by the very name 
 in ' Hamlet,' " Mneas' Tale to Dydo, largely [i.e. freely] and truly translated 
 out of Virgil, which I once showed to the Queen's Majesty, and had it 
 again." But he had lost it, having lent it, with other writings, to " some 
 such noble friends as I am loathe to offend " — by asking them back. Church- 
 yard was just the man to have conceived the idea of the fine paraphrase of 
 Virgil, which Hamlet professed to have taken direct from a play, although 
 doubdess his versification would have been uncouth and the scene only half 
 realised. The three archaic words which are peculiar to it, " mobled queen," 
 
 342 
 
LORD ESSEX AS HECTOR 
 
 Hector 
 
 Turning next to the Trojans, who are the states- 
 men, soldiers, or men of affairs, the great figure is 
 Hector. He corresponds at many points with the 
 gallant and ill-fated Earl of Essex. It is undoubted 
 that Shakespeare had this noble in his mind in drawing 
 more than one of his characters. The Germans are 
 fond of seeing him in Hamlet — his irresolution, balancing 
 of motives, scruples of conscience ; which is not at all 
 unlikely, although Hamlet is Shakespeare himself, and 
 his irresolution not constitutional, but an artifice of his 
 affected madness. In the case of Henry V. at Agin- 
 court in 141 4 it is not merely probable, but demonstrable, 
 that he was thinking of Essex in his French campaign 
 of 1 59 1 — the incident of the king trailing a pike, and 
 moving about among his men like one of them, being 
 true of Essex, but not ascribed to Henry V. in Holinshed. 
 Also in the case of ' Coriolanus ' it is nearly certain that 
 Shakespeare got his hint and idea for that play from 
 Dr. Barlow's sermon at Paul's Cross after the rebellion 
 and confessions of Essex, in which the latter is compared 
 with Coriolanus, "a gallant young, but discontented, 
 Roman, who might make a fit parallel for the late Earl, 
 if you read his life " in North's Plutarch, and according 
 
 "bisson rheum," and "made milch the burning eyes of heaven,*' are just 
 such as the old poet from Shrewsbury would have used. His noble friend 
 who had this manuscript of him I should guess was Southampton, in 
 whose library Shakespeare would have seen it. The dramatised version 
 may have been actually that Dido and ^neas which I have given reasons 
 for associating with a private performance at Southampton House in 1598 
 {supra, p. 206). If that were so, it is interesting to recall what Shakespeare 
 wrote or it some six years after (ist and 2nd quartos, 1603, 1604) : 
 
 Ham. I heard thee speak a speech once, but it was never acted ; or, if it was, 
 not above once ; for the play, I remember, pleased not the million ; 'twas caviare 
 to the general ; but it was — as 1 received it, and others, whose judgements in such 
 matters cried in the top of mine — an excellent play, well digested in the scenes, set 
 down with as much modesty as cunning. I remember, one said there were no 
 sallets in the lines to make the matter savoury, nor no matter in the phrase that 
 might indict the author of affectation ; but called it an honest method, as whole" 
 some as sweet, and by very much more handsome than fine. One speech in it I 
 chiefly loved : 'twas Eneas' tale to Dido, etc. 
 
 343 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 to the " parallel " method of Plutarch. Lastly, it has 
 been shown in a former chapter how closely Essex 
 corresponds with Sebastian in 'The Tempest.' Some 
 of these points of agreement are the same as those with 
 Hector in this play. Essex's noble infirmity of im- 
 patience, from the generosity of his nature, is brought 
 out in Hector with unusual care. On the last fatal 
 morning, when he is eager for the fray, Shakespeare is 
 at pains to make no fewer, than three persons in Troy 
 try to restrain him by successive warnings and entreaties 
 — first Andromache, then Cassandra, then Priam. (In 
 Homer it is Priam and Hecuba who try to dissuade 
 him in a few words.) He resists them all ; it is 
 Essex's "last fatal impatience, for so I will call it" 
 (Bacon). The challenge of Hector, which ^neas 
 carried to the camp of the Greeks, with its curious 
 anachronism from the age of chivalry, is exactly Essex's 
 challenge to Villars, Governor of Rouen, in the campaign 
 of 1591 ; single combat was to decide which of them 
 was the better man, fought for the better cause, or 
 served the fairer mistress. Although the last clause 
 sounds strange for 1591, yet it is historical ; and it was 
 probably because it was quixotically characteristic of 
 Essex that Shakespeare recalled it in depicting him as 
 Hector in the following challenge which ^neas delivered 
 on his behalf : 
 
 If there be one among the fair'st of Greece 
 That holds his honour higher than his ease, 
 That seeks his praise more than he fears his peril. 
 That knows his valour and knows not his fear, 
 That loves his mistress more than in confession 
 With truant vows to her own lips he loves, 
 And dare avow her beauty and her worth 
 In other arms than hers — to him this challenge. 
 Hector, in view of Trojans and of Greeks, 
 Shall make it good, or do his best to do it : 
 He hath a lady wiser, fairer, truer, etc. 
 
 The characterisation of Hector is particular and con- 
 
 344 
 
FULKE GREVILLE AS ^NEAS 
 
 sistent throughout, ^neas, who knew him well, sums 
 him up in words which suit Essex perfectly : 
 
 In the extremity of great and little, 
 
 Valour and pride excel themselves in Hector : 
 
 The one almost as infinite as all, 
 
 The other blank as nothing. Weigh him well. 
 
 And that which looks like pride is courtesy. 
 
 But the most significant thing is the manner of Hector's 
 death. In this the play departs not only from Homer 
 radically, but also from the post-Homeric tradition, as 
 in Lydgate. From Lydgate Shakespeare took the idea 
 of making Hector exhaust himself in pursuit of " one in 
 sumptuous armour," so that he has to rest after the 
 capture, with his helmet off and his shield hung on his 
 back. But he follows Lydgate no farther : Hector is 
 not killed by Achilles, but is surrounded unarmed and 
 done to death in cold blood by the spears of the 
 Myrmidons. That is really the manner of Troilus' 
 death in Lydgate ; but in the play Troilus escapes alive, 
 and his fate is transferred to Hector. It is most 
 appropriate to Essex's end — a death in the Tower at the 
 hands of the executioner after a formal process before 
 his peers. That Achilles should have commanded the 
 Myrmidons to enclose Hector and dispatch him is 
 merely a necessity of the action arising out of the con- 
 ventional relations of parties ; but the tradition has been 
 varied or adapted with the utmost ingenuity. 
 
 ^NEAS 
 
 The other figures among the Trojan heroes who are 
 assigned prominent parts are -iEneas and, of course, 
 Troilus. The part of Mneas is a distinguished one. 
 He goes between the besieged city and the camp of the 
 Greeks, honoured on both sides ; he is also the useful 
 man inside Troy, on the occasion of Diomed coming to 
 fetch Cressida, and in the affairs of Troilus. He is 
 reported taken by Ajax, and Troilus vows that he must 
 
 345 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 be rescued from him, I have no doubt that he is meant 
 for Fulke Greville, and that the part of Mn&a.s in the 
 action of the play is determined not by classical authority, 
 but solely because the author knew of one who was fitted 
 to fill such a part. The proofs are not of so particular 
 a kind as in some other instances ; but I may point out 
 that the last words given to ^neas, "You do dis- 
 comfort," etc., show the same cheerful spirit as Gonzalo 
 (Fulke Greville) is made to express at more than one 
 place in ' The Tempest.' 
 
 Troilus 
 
 In the case of Troilus we have one of those audacious 
 marks of identity which Shakespeare is wont to intro- 
 duce. Pandarus, in pointing him out to Cressida among 
 the chiefs returning from the field, exclaims : " O 
 admirable youth ! he ne'er saw three and twenty." 
 Lord Pembroke was not out twenty-three until the 
 9th of April 1603 ; the age of Troilus must have been 
 fixed some time shortly before the 7th of February 1603, 
 when the play was entered on the Stationers' Register. 
 Troilus, in all but his love passages, and perhaps sub- 
 stantially in these also, is a correct portrait of Lord 
 Pembroke, "the world's fresh ornament" of the Sonnets. 
 The chief passage is the description of him by Ulysses 
 (IV. V. 96) : 
 
 The youngest son of Priam, a true knight, 
 Not yet mature, yet matchless, firm of word, 
 Speaking in deeds, and deedless in his tongue ; 
 Not soon provoked, nor being provoked soon calm'd ; 
 His heart and hand both open and both free ; 
 For what he has he gives, what thinks he shows ; 
 Yet gives he not till judgement guide his bounty, 
 Nor dignifies an impure thought with breath ; 
 Manly as Hector, but more dangerous ; 
 For Hector in his blaze of wrath subscribes 
 To tender objects, but he in heat of action 
 Is more vindicative than jealous love : 
 They call him Troilus, and on him erect 
 346 
 
LORD PEMBROKE AS TROILUS 
 
 A second hope, as fairly built as Hector. 
 Thus says ^neas ; one that knows the youth 
 Even to his inches, and with private soul 
 Did in great Ilion thus translate him to me. 
 
 JEnea.s, who knows Troilus even to his inches, is Fulke 
 Greville, the loyal friend of Sir Philip Sidney, who 
 seemed to live again in his nephew Pembroke both in 
 countenance and in character. " Not soon provoked," 
 open and free of speech, are exactly the qualities of the 
 young noble in the ' Lover's Complaint ' : 
 
 His qualities were beauteous as his form. 
 
 For maiden-tongued he was, and thereof free ; 
 
 Yet, if men moved him, was he such a storm 
 
 As oft 'twixt May and April is to see^ 
 
 When winds breathe sweet, unruly though they be. 
 
 But the third line, in italics, is the most characteristic 
 thing. The thought is expanded by Troilus himself in 
 the reply to his priest-brother Helenus at the Trojan 
 council (II. ii. 46) : 
 
 Nay, if we talk of reason. 
 Let's shut our gates and sleep : manhood and honour 
 Should have hare-hearts, would they but fat their thoughts 
 With this cramm'd reason : reason and respect 
 Make livers pale and lustihood deject. 
 
 This is the ruling maxim of Philocosmus in Daniel's 
 dialogue Musophtlus, the young noble who is Daniel's 
 interlocutor being clearly pointed out, in the last stanzas, 
 as his former pupil, Lord Herbert. One of the many 
 fine stanzas which Daniel gives to him must suffice 
 to identify Pembroke with Troilus in his reply to 
 Helenus : 
 
 Men find that action is another thing 
 
 Than what they in discoursing papers read : 
 
 The world's affairs require in managing 
 
 More arts than those wherein you clerks proceed : 
 
 Whilst tim'rous Knowledge stands considering 
 
 Audacious Ignorance hath done the deed, — 
 
 347 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 "timorous knowledge" becoming the "hare-hearts" 
 crammed with reason. 
 
 I have already pointed out that it was probably from 
 the poem in which these lines occur that Shakespeare 
 got his general idea of Greeks and Trojans as re- 
 spectively the men of thought and the men of action. 
 
 Cressida 
 
 In the part of Cressida, Shakespeare has departed 
 from tradition to suit his own purpose, just as he has 
 done in most of the characters and in some of the 
 action of his play. The episode of Troilus, Cressida, 
 Diomed, and Pandarus is taken from Chaucer in its 
 main outlines. But Chaucer's Cressida is not at all a 
 wanton ; she is pensive and full of conscience, becoming 
 faithless through a hard fate rather than by the original 
 lightness of her love. Shakespeare drew his Cressida 
 from the life, and there can be little doubt that she is 
 made to show the least favourable side of Mistress 
 Fitton. He betrays his private thought, with a care- 
 lessness that is really unpardonable, in the following 
 dialogue between Cressida and her uncle Pandarus, 
 before Troilus was introduced to her : 
 
 Cres. There is among the Greeks Achilles, a better man than 
 Troilus. 
 
 Pan. Achilles ! a drayman, a porter, a very camel. 
 
 Cres. Well, well. 
 
 Pan. " Well, well." Why, have you any discretion ? have 
 you any eyes ? do you know what a man is ? Is [not birth, beauty, 
 good shape, discourse, manhood, learning, gentleness, virtue, youth, 
 liberality, and such like, the spice and salt that season a man ? 
 
 But how could any one deny those qualities to the 
 god-like Achilles, the son of Peleus by the goddess 
 Thetis, the paragon of the heroic world ? There is 
 not even an attempt to disguise the identity of Shake- 
 speare himself in making Achilles " a drayman, a porter, 
 a very camel." Cressida's preference for him over 
 
 348 
 
CRESSIDA, HELEN, PANDARUS 
 
 Troilus was probably real enough ; and there is a touch 
 of pride in thus bringing it to light. 
 
 Helen 
 
 Lastly, the picture of Helen is so lifelike, and the 
 argument of Hector (Essex), at the council of the 
 Trojan princes, for sending her back to her lawful 
 husband so modern, that we are led to look for an 
 actual Elizabethan counterpart. The beautiful Lady 
 Rich, Lord Essex's sister, was exactly in that relation 
 to Lord Mountjoy, being received in the great world as 
 the mistress of his lordship's house for several years 
 before she was divorced from Lord Rich. It is not to 
 be supposed that that well-known case is reproduced in 
 its real relations, or that Paris is Lord Mountjoy and 
 Menelaus Lord Rich. The author's imagination would 
 never be bound in such fetters of consistency. But, if 
 there were no other proof that he was thinking of the 
 men and women of his own time, the scene between 
 Helen, Paris, and Pandarus, and the narrated wit- 
 combat between Helen and Troilus, would remind us 
 irresistibly that we were in the Court of Elizabeth. 
 Queen Hecuba laughed till her eyes ran o'er, and even 
 Cassandra laughed. Shakespeare had some unusually 
 good means of knowing the witty sayings and doings 
 of the great world of his time ; his informants must 
 have been witty to retail them to him, and he was, of 
 course, quick to apprehend. He was admitted within 
 the walls of Ilium from time to time upon his proper 
 business of player, and saw enough to realise in outline ; 
 but his more particular knowledge would have been 
 brought to him by Cressida herself, until such time as 
 she was sent back to her father in order to ransom 
 Antenor. 
 
 The play ends with an epilogue spoken by Pandarus, 
 which has done more than anything else to fix the 
 character of satire upon the whole piece. The action 
 
 349 
 
ACHILLES IN HIS TENT 
 
 really ends with the words of Troilus on the murder of 
 Hector : 
 
 Strike a free march to Troy ! with comfort go ; 
 Hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe. 
 
 It looks as if the reappearance of Pandarus at the 
 close, and his speech as epilogue, had been an after- 
 thought of a later year, the unpleasant subject of his 
 speech being akin to ideas in ' King Lear ' and ' Timon 
 of Athens,' with the Aristophanic touch of bitterness 
 proper to the years about 1605-6. The identity of 
 Pandarus is obscure, and is perhaps complex in itself. 
 He is called the Prince of Lycia on the title-page, and is 
 a courtier in manners ; but in his last speech he goes 
 farther than he had done as Cressida's "uncle" to 
 justify the derivation of " pandar " from his name — a 
 broker-lackey. It is probable that he is compounded 
 of more than one original — his manners and rank taken 
 from some one actually among the Trojans of the day, 
 and his practices those of some inferior person, not 
 unlike ParoUes, or the Lodowick of ' Edward III.' 
 
 350 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 MARIANA IN THE MOATED GRANGE 
 
 If one were to select the plays of Shakespeare in which 
 moralists have been most at a loss to understand the 
 justice measured out to one or more of the characters, 
 the following would be the list : ' Measure for Measure,' 
 'Twelfth Night,' 'Hamlet,' 'All's Well that Ends 
 Well,* and ' Troilus and Cressida.' ' The Tempest ' 
 ought to be added as the most perplexing of all, in 
 respect both of the unintelligible wrongs which Prospero 
 had endured at the hands of his " enemies," and of the 
 strange indignities which he put upon two of them, the 
 drunken butler and the jester. There might be added 
 also ' The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' in respect of the 
 supine conduct of Valentine in forgiving his treacherous 
 friend Proteus. In 'Troilus and Cressida,' we are 
 perplexed by the tone of the whole, as well as shocked 
 that Hecter should be taken with his armour ofF and 
 done to death in cold blood by the spears of Achilles' 
 Myrmidons. In 'All's Well that Ends Well,' Dr. 
 Johnson, pre-eminent as a moralist, is aggrieved that 
 the mean and heartless conduct of Bertram, as he 
 thought it, should be rewarded with married happiness. 
 In ' Measure for Measure,' the same critic opines that 
 "every reader feels some indignation when he finds 
 Angelo spared " ; while Coleridge is pained by that 
 issue as by no other plot of Shakespeare's : the pardon of 
 Angelo " baffles the strong indignant claims of justice." 
 In ' Hamlet ' everything is perverse : Polonius, a 
 
 351 
 
MARIANA 
 
 " good old man," is murdered ; but Claudius is let oiF 
 time after time until the end, when he is dispatched with 
 a batch of others on the stage ; while Ophelia's calamity 
 appears to be absolutely gratuitous. In 'Twelfth 
 Night,' for all the humour and gusto of the action, 
 " the maltreatment of Malvolio does not really appeal," 
 says a dramatic critic, "to civilised sensitive human 
 beings : even the glamour of Shakespeare's name is 
 insufficient to render this aspect of the play agreeable." 
 The practical joke upon the countess' steward is the 
 more remarkable that it is wholly Shakespeare's 
 invention, without conventional warrant from any old 
 story. 
 
 The explanation is the same in them all — the author's 
 own private affairs. Valentine's pardon of Proteus in 
 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona' is Shakespeare's 
 condonation of the theft of his mistress by Lord 
 Herbert (in the Sonnets). Hamlet's revenge is not 
 really the blood-vengeance of a son for the murder of 
 his father, which it purports to be ostensibly, but 
 Shakespeare's own revenge upon a certain White Staff 
 of Queen Elizabeth's Court, whose identity is thinly 
 disguised under Polonius. It is the same real person 
 who is victimised by a practical joke as the steward of 
 the lady Olivia's household. It is still the same person, 
 with the same Puritanical leanings, who is caught in his 
 own toils as the lord Angelo, at once the seducer and 
 contract-breaker and the stern executor of the law upon 
 others. Those are the plays in which Shakespeare 
 deals with his own entanglement in the affairs of 
 Mistress Fitton. In the others he deals with his own 
 affairs in a more public respect — with the set made 
 against him by certain nobles and poets to keep him 
 out of the Laurel Crown or the leadership. He 
 manages all this intricate and delicate business with 
 his accustomed skill, and with greater success in 
 avoiding the charge of putting real persons on the 
 stage than some of his contemporaries. In all this he is 
 
 352 
 
'MEASURE FOR MEASURE' 
 
 " like himself," as Francis Bacon knew that he ought 
 to have been, but did not succeed in being. He is 
 by nature vindictive, a good hater, " a wiper of scores 
 out with all men." But he is also merciful, as one 
 should be who needs mercy. I believe it will be found 
 that the anomalies of poetic or dramatic justice which 
 the critics have noted in a few of the plays can all 
 be accounted for by the intrusion of his personal feel- 
 ing in personal circumstances. More particularly in 
 ' Measure for Measure,' the pardon of Angelo by the 
 duke has a purely personal meaning. 
 
 The date of ' Measure for Measure ' is known fairly 
 well. The entry of it in the Revels Accounts, as having 
 been given before King James at Whitehall on 26th 
 December 1604, is probably correct in substance 
 (although the existing record may not be that authentic 
 one which Malone must have seen). The play has 
 obvious affinities in thought with ' Hamlet,' and some 
 with ' Twelfth Night.' It is one of the group belong- 
 ing to the years 160 1-4, the order of which may 
 have been 'Twelfth Night,' 'Hamlet,' 'Troilus and 
 Cressida,' and ' Measure for Measure.' It is probable 
 that the three former were written before the accession 
 of James in April 1603, the latter after it. The duke, 
 in ' Measure for Measure,' I. i. 68, is made to excuse his 
 privy departure from his capital in words which are in 
 effect an ingenious reference to King James's " inhibition 
 against the inordinate and daily access of people," cited 
 in a True Narrative of the Entertainment of the King 
 from Edinburgh to London (1603). His motive may 
 have been the same as Henry VIII. 's in 15 13, who, on 
 going publicly to St. Paul's, avoided the press of people 
 through fear of the infection of plague then raging 
 severely. The great plague of 1603 interfered with 
 business of every kind in London, closed the theatres, 
 and sent the players travelling. Supposing this play to 
 have been written in that year, it could hardly have 
 been produced at a public theatre until 1604 (during 
 
 353 2 A 
 
MARIANA 
 
 which there was a lull in the plague), and might then 
 have been reserved for a first performance before the 
 Court at Christmas. 
 
 'Measure for Measure' is one of the plays that 
 grew out of the chief situation of the Sonnets, the 
 poet's entanglement in the affairs of Mistress Fitton. 
 The shortest way to the personal interest of it is 
 through Mariana living in dejection in the moated 
 grange. Mariana is Mary Fitton, who did actually 
 retire in melancholy to a moated grange after her 
 disgrace and her release from durance in May 1601. 
 Her moated grange is still in existence nearly the same 
 as when she occupied it. It is about nine miles from 
 Coventry, and four from Nuneaton — some five-and- 
 twenty from Stratford -on -Avon — standing on the 
 border of the park of Arbury Hall, the residence of 
 her sister Anne, wife of John Newdigate, the squire 
 of Arbury. Its present name is Temple House, a 
 name which has descended from its ancient association 
 with the Knights Templars. The square tower at the 
 eastern end is probably as old as the Templars them- 
 selves. The site of another preceptory of the order, 
 Temple Bruer, or Temple Grange, in Lincolnshire, is 
 still marked by a similar f massive tower " ; while the 
 preceptory of Temple Chelsing, parish of Sacomb, 
 Herts, is now represented only by the moat. The 
 Temple Grange of Arbury still keeps the moat, the 
 tower, and the dwelling-house, the two former of 
 Templar age, the latter in the Tudor style. After 
 the suppression of the Knights Templars in the begin- 
 ning of the fourteenth century, their preceptory would 
 appear to have become the grange of the adjoining 
 Augustinian priory of Arbury. It retains a trace of 
 having been the grange or granary of the monastery 
 in the immense tithe-barn, of which one of the original 
 walls remains, of red sandstone three feet thick — the 
 same stone that is seen in the Tudor grange -house. 
 The rectangular cross of the Knights Templars, which 
 
 354 
 
THE MOATED GRANGE 
 
 is cut in the stone over one of the windows, may have 
 been added during a restoration some fifty years ago ; 
 but it marks correctly the history of the house, and the 
 origin of its name, which was probably Temple Grange 
 before it became Temple House. 
 
 Shakespeare calls Mariana's residence the moated 
 grange at St. Luke's : 
 
 Duke. I will presently to Saint Luke's : there, at the moated 
 grange, resides this dejected Mariana. 
 
 St. Luke's is a somewhat thin disguise of Temple. 
 That evangelist is associated in a quite peculiar way 
 with the Temple through his two first chapters. It 
 does not appear that St. Luke was the patron saint of 
 the Knights Templars in the same way that St. John 
 Baptist was of the Knights Hospitallers ; but Scott, 
 who had many odd sources of knowledge, must have 
 had some reason for making the Templar in Ivanhoe 
 swear, "Now, by St. Luke" (while he gives him one 
 or more other oaths on other occasions). But, so far 
 as concerns Shakespeare's own habitual association of 
 ideas, it can be shown that he would have translated 
 Temple by St. Luke's. This proof comes from ' The 
 Taming of the Shrew,' the only other play in which 
 the name St. Luke's is found. It is there given twice 
 to the Christian church in modern Padua at which the 
 marriage of Bianca was to be celebrated. Why did he 
 call the church St. Luke's, why give it a name at all ? 
 The old play, which he adapted, lays its scene in ancient 
 Athens, and correctly gives the said marriage to a pagan 
 celebrant, the priest of the temple of Hymen ; but, for 
 the rest, the author, or authors, forget that they are in 
 pagan antiquity, and speak of " the church " in nearly 
 a dozen places. The incongruity in the ecclesiological 
 language is so noticeable that Shakespeare humorously 
 resolves that there shall be consistency on his part. 
 Therefore, in adapting the scenes to modern times, he 
 transfers the hymeneal rite to a church with the name 
 
 355 
 
MARIANA 
 
 of the Christian saint and evangelist most naturally sug- 
 gested by Temple. In the plan of Padua given in 
 Braun's Civitates Orbis Terrarum, the work which he 
 used for local colour in ' Hamlet * (Elsinore), and in 
 ' The Two Gentlemen of Verona ' (Milan), he would 
 have found a church dedicated to St, Luke ; but it is 
 not easy to find in the plan, being one of the smaller 
 churches, and would not have been chosen unless the 
 name had been suggested to him in the association of 
 his ideas with the Temple, The same association would 
 have recurred when he was thinking of a name for 
 Temple Grange, 
 
 Much has been written on the identity of Mariana's 
 moated grange, but that has been by way of comment 
 upon Tennyson, not upon Shakespeare, Tennyson had 
 studied ' Measure for Measure ' closely (before he was 
 twenty) and composed the two exquisite poems of 
 " Mariana " and " Isabel " under the inspiration of it. 
 It is easy to see whence he got his ideas for Mariana's 
 Castle of Dejection. Malone pointed out, in a note 
 to this passage, a fact which Tennyson must have 
 known quite well, namely, that any solitary house in 
 the Lincolnshire Fens is called a grange.^ It was in 
 some such house that Tennyson placed the dejected 
 Mariana, The scenery is of the Fens — no trees, a 
 sluice not far from the house, etc. Although the vege- 
 tation around the house comes into the picture with 
 striking effect, there is only a formal reference to a 
 moat in one of the lines — 
 
 In the lonely moated grange — 
 
 as if to justify the motto of the poem from ' Measure 
 for Measure.' The dykes proper to the fen, to which 
 pertained the sluice, must do duty for the moat, and 
 any lonely house for the grange. 
 
 ' Measure for Measure ' is based upon George 
 
 1 " In Lincolnshire they at this day call every lone house that is uncon- 
 nected with others a p-ange." 
 
 356 
 
WHETSTONE'S OLD PLAY 
 
 Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra, a. play in two 
 parts published in 1578. Whetstone was one of the 
 most vigorous and original of the earlier Elizabethan 
 playwrights, with that property in his writing of 
 stimulating the imagination, which Shakespeare profited 
 so much by in reading the work of less thoughtful and 
 simpler minds. The old play contains some powerful 
 and effective scenes, the merit of which was recognised 
 by Thomas Campbell in his well-known Introduction 
 to an edition of Shakespeare. It is needless to look 
 beyond it for the groundwork of the later play, or to 
 follow the learned and exhaustive Douce into the many 
 parallel forms of the same story. Several hints that 
 Shakespeare used for his own purpose lie on the surface 
 of Whetstone's drama ; for example, the latter quotes 
 the maxim, Cucullus non facit monachum, " the cowl 
 does not make the monk," which was the hint for the 
 duke's disguise as a monk, and for the whole business 
 of monastery and nunnery introduced as novelties into 
 ' Measure for Measure.' The most important thing 
 that he copied exactly from Whetstone, besides the 
 business of prisoners, gaoler, and executioner, is the 
 character of Angelo, which is the same as that of 
 Promos — an austere man of hitherto unblemished virtue, 
 who makes a sudden slip, and thereafter behaves meanly 
 to cover his lapse. It was this character that attracted 
 Shakespeare to Whetstone's forgotten play ; he had no 
 occasion to change it, but he changed much else. 
 
 The scene of the original play is laid at the town of 
 Julio, in Hungary, of which the governor is Promos. 
 He enforces an old law against seduction, and himself 
 breaks it. In Part II. of the old play the king, Cor- 
 vinus, comes to the town to investigate the conduct of 
 Promos. Shakespeare alters this, so that the scene is 
 the capital, Vienna, and Angelo (for Promos) the deputy 
 of the duke, who has taken leave of absence for a time, 
 but remains near the scene in the disguise of a monk. 
 The action then proceeds mutatis mutandis. But the 
 
 357 
 
MARIANA 
 
 part of Cassandra, who is the governor's victim in the 
 old comedy, is divided between two — Isabella and 
 Mariana — who play into each other's hands. The new 
 heroine, Mariana, had been contracted to Angelo five 
 years before, but the contract was disavowed by him on 
 the minor ground that her dowry had been lost, but 
 chiefly for the reason that he had made discoveries 
 against her honour, or that her " reputation was dis- 
 valued in levity." By the good offices of the disguised 
 duke, Mariana takes the place of Isabella at the mid- 
 night assignation with Angelo ; Isabella's virtue is 
 saved, and Mariana is enabled to force Angelo into the 
 fulfilment of his old contract. Angelo is condemned 
 under his own law (as in the original) ; but Mariana 
 begs his life (backed by Isabella), and the play ends, 
 as Whetstone's does, with the promise of their married 
 felicity. There are, it will be observed, considerable 
 variations from the original story ; and in discovering 
 the reason for them, we discover a private motive. 
 
 Shakespeare found Isabella and Mariana, and the 
 personation of the one by the other, in a ballad of the 
 time ; only it is Isabel who personates Maria in the 
 ballad. This ballad, called " The Happy Adventure ; 
 or The Witty Lady," and to be sung to the tune " Wert 
 thou much fairer than thou art," is printed among 
 others in Jordan's Royal Arbour of Loyal Poesie (1664). 
 Strangely enough, its existence there was overlooked by 
 Malone, who saw that three of its companion ballads 
 were " founded on the fables of ' Much Ado About 
 Nothing,' « The Winter's Tale,' and ' The Merchant of 
 Venice.' " Collier also overlooked the ' Measure for 
 Measure ' ballad, while he claimed the discovery of the 
 other three, saying nothing about Malone's acquaintance 
 with them fifty years before. Malone was careful to 
 say that the ballads were " founded on the fables " of 
 the three comedies ; and he pointed out that ' The 
 Merchant of Venice ' ballad — " The Forfeiture " — 
 made the Jew's own daughter, corresponding to Jessica 
 
 3S8 
 
A BALLAD SOURCE 
 
 in the play, to act the part of the merchant's advocate 
 before the court. Collier's hypothesis was, that the 
 ballads were actually taken out of Shakespeare's plots 
 — postulating an imagination which might just as well 
 have been original, so many are the variations and the 
 picturesque touches not to be found in the plays. Not 
 so much for the sake of the ballad itself, or for the 
 refutation of the Collier theory, but as necessary to the 
 proof of Shakespeare's original source for Isabel and 
 Mariana to replace Cassandra, I give here most of the 
 stanzas of it : — 
 
 THE HAPPY ADVENTURE ; OR THE WITTY LADY 
 
 A Story 
 
 Tune — *' Wert thou much fairer than thou art." 
 
 All you that wit and beauty know, 
 
 Give ear to me and I will show 
 
 A witty fair one that can fit 
 
 Your minds with beauty and with wit. 
 
 She was a Virgin not inthrall'd. 
 
 And commonly Maria call'd. 
 
 Fair Isabel was one that she 
 Had lov'd even from her infancy. 
 Which was betrothed to a quick 
 And nimble youth call'd Frederick ; 
 Who for a chance which often doth 
 Befall, refus'd to keep his oath. 
 
 Her brother was a merchant, and 
 Had all her portion in his hand, 
 A man of judgment, wealth, and wit. 
 And went himself to sea with it : 
 But certain news came on a day. 
 He and his ship was cast away. 
 
 Her portion by mischance thus gone. 
 She must no more be lookt upon ; 
 For Frederick will make 't appear 
 He loved her money more than her : 
 Thus in one day she must forego 
 A brother and a husband too. 
 
 359 
 
MARIANA 
 
 He doth begin to love each grace 
 That dwells in fair Maria's face ; 
 Her wit and beauty (both combined) 
 So strangely captivate his minde, 
 That he sollicites night and day 
 The lady in a lustful way. 
 
 His last request she answers thus : 
 
 Sir, what will people speak of us 
 
 IPt should be known, as 'twill (quoth she). 
 
 If I at last with child should be ? 
 
 He answers straight (to quiet all fear). 
 
 Ere that be known he'll marry her. 
 
 She bids him come at night, and she 
 Will entertain him secretly : 
 Quoth she, if just at ten you'l wait 
 You shall come through the garden gate : 
 One pair of stairs you cannot miss. 
 Next to the bower my chamber is. 
 
 There we in darkness both must lye, 
 You'l finde no other light but I. 
 And in the morning, when the day 
 Appears, you must make haste away ; 
 Lest visitants do come to me 
 And make a sad discovery. 
 
 The morning comes, the sun doth rise ; 
 And now he views his mistress' eyes ; 
 But when he had survey'd her well, 
 'Twas his contracted Isabel. 
 
 This was the witty fair one's plot. 
 He swore and curst and up he got. 
 Maria doth the musick guide 
 To bid good morrow to the bride ; 
 And every part o' the town doth tell 
 That he hath married Isabel. 
 
 He findes himself thus catcht, and he 
 In silence suffers it to be. 
 Maria with good news doth come : 
 Her brother is come richly home ; 
 And that the rumour of the wrack 
 (As it appears) was a mistake. 
 
 This proves great joy to Isabel ; 
 Maria likes the news as well : 
 360 
 
A BALLAD SOURCE 
 
 For 'twas well known that he and she 
 Were lovers ere he went to sea : 
 His coming home hath rais'd them all 
 Who did in desperation fall. 
 
 They meet, kiss, and salute their loves, 
 One's soul in t'other's body moves : 
 The joyes they have no tongue can tell 
 But only they that love as well : 
 The marriage day appointed is. 
 The first step to a lover's bliss. 
 
 You witty fair ones that are here. 
 Is not this project chaste and clear ? 
 And V7as it not a noble end 
 To pleasure a contracted friend ? 
 Of all that poets e'er exprest 
 The witty fair one is the best. 
 
 Jordan, who printed this ballad in 1664 along with 
 four others, in the midst of a quantity of cavalier 
 songs and other verse which m^ht have been his 
 own, did not say where he got it. But, as he gives 
 the name of the tune at the head of it, it is probable 
 that he had an old printed broadside before him. Such 
 ballads were sung at street-corners or at gatherings of 
 people indoors. Many are extant, some with dates 
 and with the printers' or publishers' names ; and there 
 can be no doubt that they were common in Shakespeare's 
 lifetime. They were often on the same subject as a 
 play ; for example, * Troilus and Cressida ' and ' Titus 
 Andronicus.' Elderton, who was one of Robert 
 Greene's boon companions, is known to have been the 
 author of several ; and it is probable that Greene 
 himself, a spendthrift man of genius, resorted to that 
 kind of composition among the many other exercises 
 of his prolific pen. Collier's hypothesis, that ballads 
 were extracted in later times from plays, will apply well 
 enough to certain specimens which he possessed, written 
 in a feigned handwriting, with a peculiar pigment, on 
 the blank pages of a MS. copy of the Eikon Basilike. 
 
 The simplest proof that Shakespeare must have 
 361 
 
MARIANA 
 
 had this ballad before him, for the parts of Isabella 
 and Mariana, is that he took those names and that 
 of Frederick from it ; that he transposed the parts 
 of Maria and Isabel because he wanted the name of 
 Maria (Mariana) for the contracted lady ; that he gave 
 the name of Frederick, the " nimble youth " who jilted 
 the lady after the loss of her dower, to the brother 
 who had her dower at sea with him and lost it, having 
 another name, Angelo, for the contract-breaker. But 
 he makes the brother to be " Frederick, the great 
 soldier who miscarried at sea," a "noble and re- 
 nowned " person, forgetting to explain why a great 
 soldier should have had his sister's dowry at sea with 
 him. In the ballad it is all intelligible and consistent ; 
 her brother was a merchant, who was trading with his 
 sister's money ; the money being supposed lost by the 
 wreck of the venture, her lover jilted her on purely 
 mercenary grounds. Shakespeare keeps the loss of the 
 dower, but he is careful to state that the contract had 
 been broken " chiefly " because Angelo " pretended 
 discoveries of dishonour " in Mariana, or that " her 
 reputation was disvalued in levity." This contract had 
 been made five years before the action begins, and 
 broken off some time in the interval. Mariana had 
 fallen into dejection, and was now residing in the 
 moated grange at St. Luke's. 
 
 Is it conceivable that a ballad-maker could have 
 extracted " The Witty Lady " from the dramatic parts 
 of Isabella and Mariana.? Is it not certain that 
 Shakespeare had the ballad before him, and that he 
 picked out from it just what suited his purpose ? If 
 so, the changes which he made are significant. His 
 Mariana was Mary Fitton, a lady of the Court ; there- 
 fore her brother is noble and a great soldier. She fell 
 into disgrace ; therefore her reputation was disvalued 
 in levity. She was virtually contracted to Sir "William 
 Knollys, the Comptroller of the Household, about 1597- 
 98, who behaved coldly to her at the time of her mishap 
 
 362 
 
TEMPLE GRANGE 
 
 in 1 60 1 ; therefore she was contracted to Angelo five 
 years before the scene opens, and therefore his 
 desertion of her at some unstated time, partly for the 
 original motive, the loss of her dowry, but " chiefly " for 
 a new motive, because he "pretended in her discoveries 
 of dishonour." And lastly, she was living in melan- 
 choly with or near her sister at Arbury, at the moated 
 Temple Grange, on the border of the park ; therefore 
 the dejected Mariana is residing in the moated grange 
 at St. Luke's. 
 
 The most startling and unpleasant corollary of this 
 identification of Mariana is, that the lord Angelo is 
 Sir William KnoUys. But before coming to that 
 question, it may be well to find some evidence that 
 Mary Fitton did actually take up her residence at 
 Temple Grange, and not in Arbury Hall itself. The 
 grange is a good one of its kind, built of red sandstone, 
 with lofty pointed windows in the better wing (now 
 restored after the original design). It is somewhat out 
 of the way and is easily overlooked, about half a mile 
 to the north-west of the Hall, the roofs of which are 
 visible from it among the trees. It is one of those 
 moated houses, of the smaller kind, which stand well 
 back from the moat on all sides, occupying the centre 
 of an enclosed area a hundred yards square, the moat 
 being about twelve feet broad, of some depth, still full 
 of clear water, and planted close round with trees, the 
 roots of which are visible in the steep banks. There is 
 one decayed oak tree behind the house, of huge girth 
 and obviously of high antiquity. Temple House is 
 not of great extent, but it is handsomely built, and 
 sufficient. Tracing its history back, it was repaired 
 about the year 1854, at which time a fourth part of the 
 moat, on the front or south side, was levelled up. On 
 pulling up the old oaken floors, various relics were 
 found under them, including certain papers which 
 showed that the house had been at one time licensed 
 as an inn (although it is remote from existing public 
 
 363 
 
MARIANA 
 
 roads). What the old tower may contain nobody 
 knows, as it has not been entered for many years.^ 
 Let it be assumed that the Grange some half mile from 
 Arbury Hall was available in the summer of 1601. 
 Mistress Fitton made a " stolen journey " from London 
 in the company of her father, Sir Edward Fitton, to 
 their home at Gawsworth, near Macclesfield. But she 
 did not remain there long, owing doubtless to a want 
 of sympathy between her and her mother, which is 
 otherwise proved. She came to her sister at Arbury, 
 and resided either in the Hall or, as I maintain, at the 
 adjoining Grange for some time, perhaps intermittently 
 for several years. Her presence with or near her 
 sister is referred to in several letters to Lady Newdi- 
 gate from Sir William Knollys, Sir Richard Leveson, 
 and Mr. Francis Beaumont. In a letter probably of 
 the year 1603, Knollys writes: "Whether your sister 
 be with you or no, I know not ; but, if she be, add 
 something of your love of her for my sake, who could 
 desire nothing more of God than that she were 
 capable of my love, as I have ever meant it ; and what 
 will b'ecome of it God only knoweth. Let it suffice 
 that my first love shall ever bind me to love her." In 
 the last preserved of Sir William's letters to Lady 
 Newdigate, which may be dated subsequent to July 
 1603, inasmuch as she is called by the knightly title 
 
 ' The ancient manorial rights of the Templars in the parish of Chilvers 
 Coton did not come into possession of the Newdigates until after 1630, 
 having been held before that time by various persons, perhaps non-resident 
 (Dugdale's Warioickshire, p. 1071). But it is nearly certain that the Temple 
 house itself had belonged to the priory of Arbury, as the residence of 
 the "prior of the grange," and that it had gone with the monastery itself 
 at the Dissolution. The foundations of the old monastery have been met 
 with in the park at a spot between the Hall and the Grange. The great 
 quadrangular mansion was built by Sir Edmund Anderson, Chief-Justice 
 of the Common Pleas, and by him transferred in 1586 to the Newdigate 
 family in exchange for their manor of Harefield, in Middlesex, which they 
 afterwards bought back. Temple House is now the North Farm of 
 Arbury, the South Farm on the other side of the Hall being a modern 
 farmhouse, at one time occupied by " old Mr. Evans," as the aged lodge- 
 keeper remembered him, and the birthplace of his daughter by a second 
 wife, Mary Anne Evans, or George Eliot. 
 
 364 
 
RESIDENCE AT THE GRANGE 
 
 which was not conferred on her husband until that 
 date, he implies quite plainly that her sister Mary was 
 not actually with her, but " not far from " her : " You 
 may guess at my meaning. She is not far from you 
 that may decipher this riddle ; and I may boldly say 
 that Mary did not choose the better part. Yet tell her, 
 etc. . . . Yet let me be remembered to you both," etc. 
 Sir William is also a witness to the melancholy of the 
 sister. In one letter he writes : " I know that your 
 sister is apt to be melancholy " ; and in another, 
 relating to a proposed visit to Arbury : " I would not 
 doubt but to pacify, though not thoroughly to purge, 
 that humour of melancholy." 
 
 Sir Richard Leveson, a distinguished vice-admiral, 
 whose wife had been lunatic since her first confinement, 
 and who is said in a MS. of Sir Peter Leycester to have 
 been the father of two infants by Mistress Fitton, adds 
 a postscript to his letter of 1 2th April 1 603 : " Com- 
 mend me to your sister, if she be there." What does 
 " there " mean but some house not the Hall itself, but 
 near enough for Lady Newdigate to have access to ? 
 Francis Beaumont, in an undated letter which is placed 
 conjecturally in a sequence as late as 1610 or 1612, 
 writes to Lady Newdigate : " When you see my 
 Counsellor, your only sister, commend, I pray you, 
 unto her mine afl^ectionate love, but not my quintes- 
 sential ; for that is become a confined recusant, having 
 disavowed sacrifice unto all living temples saving unto 
 the living temple of the fairest and dearest deserving 
 Cynthia." The sacrifice to the living temple appears 
 to be a forced metaphor dragged in by the horns. 
 " Living " temple is a contrast to some inanimate 
 temple in his thoughts, which was probably Temple 
 Grange, the sister's residence.^ 
 
 1 She was married in 1607 to Captain Polwhele, who had been one 
 of Leveson's naval officers j and resided at Perton, a manor in Shropshire 
 which belonged to Leveson, and became hers eventually. Her husband 
 died soon, and it is possible that she may have returned to Arbury for a 
 time before her second marriage. 
 
 365 
 
MARIANA 
 
 Who was this Francis Beaumont ? Lady Newdi- 
 gate-Newdegate, to whom we owe the publication of 
 these and other invaluable letters, has been very careful 
 in her identifications and datings ; and I do not doubt 
 that she is right in making him out to be a certain 
 Francis, eventually Master of the Charterhouse, who 
 was one of several literary Beaumonts, and a cousin of 
 Francis Beaumont, of Grace Dieu, the distinguished 
 dramatist who worked with Fletcher. Some critics 
 of the Gossip from a Muniment Room have guessed 
 that Lady Newdigate's correspondent was the poet 
 himself; and, although the objections to that seem 
 insuperable, there is a strong temptation to bring 
 Francis Beaumont, the poet, into the circle of Mistress 
 Fitton's admirers. This suggestion arises, in a curious 
 way, from the song in ' Measure for Measure ' : 
 
 Take, O, take those lips away. 
 
 In the play a boy is made to sing it to Mariana at 
 the moated grange, who says, at the end of one verse, 
 " Break off thy song " — meaning that there was more 
 to follow. So, it appears, there was ; for the same first 
 verse, which was not printed until ' Measure for 
 Measure' came out in the folio of 1623, appeared 
 also in 1639 in one of the posthumous Fletcher 
 plays. The Bloody Brother, followed by a second verse : 
 
 Take, O, take those lips away, 
 
 That so sweetly were forsworn ; 
 And those eyes, the break of day, 
 
 Lights that do mislead the morn ; 
 But my kisses bring again, [bring again] : 
 Seals of love, but sealed in vain, [sealed in vain]. 
 
 Hide, O, hide those hills of snow 
 
 Which thy frozen bosom bears, 
 One whose tops the pinks that grow 
 
 Are of those that April wears. 
 But first set my poor heart free, 
 Bound in those icy chains by thee. 
 • 366 
 
A SONG AT THE GRANGE 
 
 Both verses were assigned to Shakespeare in the new 
 edition of his 'Poems' published the year after, 1640. 
 The singular thing is, that something like the rhythms 
 and ideas of both verses are found in an undoubted 
 poem of Francis Beaumont's, " The Willing Prisoner 
 to his Mistress," 3rd and 4th verses : 
 
 Hide not those panting balls of snow 
 With envious veils from my beholding ; 
 
 Unlock those lips, their pearly row 
 In a sweet smile of love unfolding. 
 
 And let those eyes, whose motion wheels 
 
 The restless fate of every lover, 
 Survey the pains my sick heart feels, 
 
 And wounds themselves have made discover. 
 
 The song " Take, O, take " may be received as 
 Shakespeare's in both verses ^ ; it contains the same 
 compliment to his mistress' eyes as he had paid to them 
 in the 132nd Sonnet. To account for its having been 
 printed in full in The Bloody Brother (quarto of 1639), 
 we have only to assume that he had given it to Fletcher, 
 or to Beaumont himself because he knew the lady of the 
 moated grange. Grace Dieu, his father's or brother's 
 house, was some twenty miles from Arbury ; other 
 
 1 Mr. Swinburne {A Study of Shakespeare, 1880, p. 205) has been at pains 
 to prove that the second verse could not have been oy Shakespeare, because 
 it does not end with the same rhythm as the first, and because " the words 
 are such as absolutely to defy antiphonal repetition or reverberation of the 
 three last in either line." If the second verse had been sung to the same 
 music as the first, it would have read : 
 
 But first set my poor heart free, poor heart free, 
 Bound in icy chains by thee, chains by thee. 
 
 The awkwardness of the result is a sufficient reason why Shakespeare did 
 not try a repetition with the second verse also, or why only one verse was 
 given to the boy to sing. The repetition in the first verse is obviously for 
 the sake of the music, composed by John Wilson, who wrote the music 
 also for " Sigh no more, ladies," and " Pardon, goddess of the night." 
 (Collier, on the evidence of a MS. of Earl Ferrers.) It is perhaps only a 
 coincidence, that a topic in two of the letters of Francis Beaumont to Lady 
 Newdigate is, the way in which Orlando di Lasso ends his songs abruptly 
 " on a black cro'tchet," which the writer believed to be more effective than 
 a dying fall. The duke in ' Twelfth Night ' preferred the latter. 
 
 367 
 
MARIANA 
 
 Beaumonts were planted in the district between ; and 
 it is likely enough that the two cousins Francis may 
 both have been visitors at Temple Grange. It is a 
 further coincidence, that Grace Dieu was the Augus- 
 tinian nunnery of those parts, just as Arbury was the 
 Augustinian priory. Shakespeare places both a monas- 
 tery and a nunnery in the neighbourhood of Mariana's 
 residence, the former being required by the duke to 
 get his monkish disguise from, the latter for the retreat 
 of Isabella, who had, for some reason, newly joined a 
 sisterhood of Clare nuns. The duke disguised as a 
 friar brings us to Shakespeare's own part, or point of 
 view, in the play. He is himself the disguised duke. 
 His private thought is betrayed by a singular slip or 
 inconsistency. The duke has newly left his capital, on 
 a supposed distant journey ; the action develops from 
 point to point with no delay, and has advanced so far 
 as to require his visit to the moated grange. , He enters 
 in his monkish garb, and Mariana at once stops the 
 boy's singing : 
 
 Break off thy song and haste thee quick away : 
 
 Here comes a man of comfort, whose advice 
 
 Hath often still' d my brawling discontent. 
 
 I cry you mercy, sir, and well could wish 
 
 You had not found me here so musical : 
 
 Let me excuse me, and believe me so, 
 
 My mirth it much displeased, but pleased my wo. 
 
 There is nothing in t"he sequel to show that Mariana 
 had mistaken him for another. The same monk had 
 been often there before, and yet the duke had newly 
 assumed the disguise of a monk. When the duke 
 had gone just before to the monastery, and confided 
 his purpose of disguise to Friar Thomas, the latter 
 assumed that his Grace was bent upon a frolic ; which 
 gives the author the opportunity of thus explaining his 
 true motive in visiting Mariana, and of refuting, in 
 anticipation, the insinuations of the cynical Lucio 
 concerning the " duke of dark corners " : 
 
 368 
 
THE DISGUISED DUKE 
 
 No, holy father, throw away that thought : 
 Believe not that the dribbling dart of love 
 Can pierce a complete bosom. Why I desire thee 
 To give me secret harbour, hath a purpose 
 More grave and wrinkled than the aims and ends 
 Of burning youth. 
 
 Mariana is made to say, in a soliloquy, that this man 
 of comfort had often stilled her brawling discontent. 
 Although this is a dramatic inconsistency, it would 
 hardly be there if it did not express Shakespeare's private 
 thought. Those visits to the grange, from a motive 
 " more grave and wrinkled than the aims and ends of 
 burning youth," bring to mind another sketch by the 
 same pen, in that strange poem 'A Lover's Complaint ' 
 which he appended to the Sonnets in 1609. The scene 
 of it may well have been the moated grange itself. 
 The opening lines — 
 
 From off a hill whose concave womb re-worded 
 A plaintful story from a sistering vale — 
 
 would suit the situation of Temple Grange, which has 
 a steep hill on its northern side as well as hilly ground 
 a little way off on the west ; there is also a stream near 
 it, like that in another stanza of the poem. The visitor 
 lays him down to listen to the tale, and 
 
 Ere long espied a fickle maid full pale 
 Tearing of papers, breaking rings a-twain. 
 Storming her world with sorrow's wind and rain. 
 
 Her identity is probably concealed under her singular 
 (heraldic ?) head-dress : 
 
 Upon her head a platted hive of straw, 
 
 which is also described as a "sheaved hat." Her 
 visitor would have been none other than the author of 
 the Sonnets himself, now residing in the country : 
 
 A reverend man that grazed his cattle nigh — 
 Sometime a blusterer, that the ruffle knew 
 Of court, of city, and had let go by 
 The swiftest hours, observed as they flew — 
 Towards this afflicted fancy fastly drew, 
 
 369 2 B 
 
MARIANA 
 
 And, privileged by age, desires to know 
 
 In brief the grounds and motives of her woe. 
 
 So slides he down upon his grained bat 
 And, comely-distant, sits he by her side ; 
 When he again desires her, being sat. 
 Her grievance with his hearing to divide ; 
 If that from him there may be aught applied 
 Which may her suffering ecstasy assuage, 
 'Tis promised in the charity of age. 
 
 " Father," she says, " though in me you behold 
 The injury of many a blasting hour, 
 Let it not tell your judgement I am old ; 
 Not age, but sorrow, over me hath power," etc. 
 
 At the close of his visit to the moated grange, the 
 disguised duke says : " But make haste, the vaporous 
 night approacheth." And that, I doubt not, was what 
 Shakespeare said on more than one occasion, when he 
 had been to see Mariana, and thought of the way back, 
 perhaps no farther than Coventry that night. 
 
 We come at length to the unpleasant subject of the 
 lord Angelo, the irreproachable governor, who made 
 so unaccountable a slip from virtue and behaved so 
 meanly in trying to cover his fault. His old friend 
 Escalus (Fulke Greville, Aulces[tri]s) says : 
 
 I am sorry one so learned and so wise 
 As you. Lord Angelo, have still appeared 
 Should slip so grossly, both in the heat of blood 
 And lack of temper'd judgement afterward. 
 
 Shakespeare found the part of Angelo ready to his 
 hand in Whetstone's Promos : he invented nothing in 
 the character, which is exactly the same in the older 
 play. Promos is a "grey beard," a man of austere 
 life, who is strangely tempted by the beauty and virtues 
 of Cassandra when she comes to beg her brother's life. 
 After she leaves him on the first occasion, he exclaims : 
 
 O God, I feel a sodaine change. 
 
 Fie, Promos, fie ! of her avoid the thought ! 
 
 370 
 
A SECOND HEROINE 
 
 This is a sufficiently promising dramatic situation with- 
 out any deeper or ulterior design. But the changes 
 that were made in the rest of the plot show that the 
 author had an ulterior design, and that he had gone 
 back to Whetstone's old play because he found in it 
 the germ of a situation which was near enough to a 
 real one within his own experience. It is his division 
 of the part of Cassandra between two, Isabella and 
 Mariana, that reveals his private purpose. Although 
 this doubling of the female part has the great dramatic 
 recommendation of enabling Isabella to repel her 
 brother's plea with indignation, and to temporise with 
 Angelo, thus giving the opportunity for a noble elo- 
 quence which is perhaps the chief charm of the play, 
 yet it has a drawback in the unpleasant incident of the 
 substitution (the same as in 'All's Well that Ends 
 Well'), which has been pronounced "disgusting" by 
 a modern critic. It will be seen from the ballad of 
 " The Happy Adventure " that they thought less seri- 
 ously of it in those days of pre-contracts. Shakespeare 
 would have avoided it if he could ; but as it was his 
 primary object to bring in Mariana, he had to put up 
 with the conditions. The first thing that we learn 
 of her is, that she had been contracted to Angelo five 
 years before. It is upon this matter of the prenuptial 
 contract that the whole question of the identity of 
 Angelo turns. The irreproachable deputy of the 
 duke, learned and wise, is so generic that he need 
 not differ from the austere and scrupulous grey beard 
 of Whetstone, who found him in an old Italian story. 
 But an elderly statesman who was contracted to a 
 young lady of position, and had broken off the contract 
 on a certain pretence, is Knollys so exactly, that he can 
 hardly have been meant for any one else, or for no one 
 in particular. The very date of the contract, five years 
 before, is curiously near the date, 1598, of those letters 
 of Sir William, in which he writes confidentially to 
 Anne Newdigate of his hopes to marry her sister, Mary 
 
 371 
 
MARIANA 
 
 Fitton, and get children by her. He was still tied, it 
 is true, to his wife, the dowager Countess of Chandos ; 
 but he made it a matter of his prayers to be soon 
 released from her, and he asked his correspondent to 
 pray for that also. So far as a married man hoping 
 soon to be a widower could enter into a contract for his 
 next marriage, he had done so ; he himself wrote, some 
 years after, of the " bands " that had formerly existed 
 between him and Mistress Fitton. She had been led 
 to understand that she was to wait for the old Lady 
 Chandos' shoes ; while Sir William, on his part, believed 
 that he was nurturing her — his figures of speech are 
 always from gardening and agriculture — to be his 
 future wife and the mother of his hoped-for progeny. 
 There is not a suspicion of anything improper. He 
 writes to her sister, that Mary used to quote the proverb 
 "While the grass grows the horse starves"; on which 
 he quotes Ps. 37 : " But both she and I must have 
 patience, and that will bring peace at the last." From all 
 that is known of him (without begging the question 
 of his identity with certain Shakespearian parts), he 
 appears to have been a man of strict life, studious, and 
 indifferent to the frivolities amidst which he lived as 
 Comptroller of the Household — censor regia. 
 
 If KnoUys was austere and pedantic, the young lady 
 of his choice was different. The authentic testimony 
 to her wit is remarkable ; for example, Francis Beau- 
 mont, in a letter assigned to 161 1, writes to Lady 
 Newdigate, that her sister was " more fine and pretty 
 than spark of velvet, and as witty as Pallas is." There 
 can be no question that she is the witty Rosaline of 
 ' Love's Labour's Lost.' Her devotion to the stage is 
 shown, among other proofs, by the fact that Will 
 Kempe, the comedian of the Globe company, dedicated 
 to her (mistaking her Christian name) his Morrice Dance 
 to Norwich. Witty herself, she was an admirer of wit 
 in others. The wittiest man of his time, Shakespeare, 
 the player and playwright, had become known to her 
 
 372 
 
"THE CHILD OF STATE" 
 
 through the not infrequent theatricals at Court. The 
 degree of intimacy which had grown up between them 
 is clear from what Biron says of Rosaline, and Rosaline 
 of Biron. One great attraction for him, the same that 
 drew him so closely to Lord Herbert, was to find himself 
 appreciated. It is easy to believe how attracted he must 
 have been by high breeding and the manners of the 
 great world. Meanwhile came the lady's amour with 
 Lord Herbert, and the fruit of it, prematurely still-born 
 (Sonnets 99 and 123)^ About a year after, there was 
 another infant, which came to the birth and was the 
 cause of a great Court scandal. Lord Pembroke cleared 
 himself of the filiation charge, and we know nothing 
 further of the case than we can decipher from one or 
 two of the sonnets. 
 
 The existence of a mysterious third lover is pointed 
 at in the " they " sections of S. 121, and in the whole 
 of S. 1 24 upon the death of the " unfathered " infant. 
 In the former, " they " are contrasted with the author 
 himself in respect of " their " virility. In the latter, 
 the same person is assumed, no question, to be the 
 father, whilst his identity is pointed at not altogether 
 vaguely. The language of the sonnet is of purpose made 
 oblique, elliptical, and actually ungrammatical ; but a 
 meaning can be found for it as one of a sequence, all 
 dealing with the disputed paternity of Mistress Fitton's 
 child : 
 
 If my dear love were but the child of State, 
 It might for Fortune's bastard be unfather'd, 
 As subject to Time's love or to Time's hate, 
 Weeds among weeds, or flowers, with flowers gather'd. 
 No, it was builded far from accident : 
 It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls 
 Under the blow of thralled discontent, 
 Whereto the inviting time our fashion calls : 
 It fears not policy, that Heretic, 
 Which works on leases of short-number'd hours. 
 But all alone stands hugely politic. 
 That it nor grows with heat nor drowns with showers. 
 To this I witness call the foals of Time, 
 Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime. 
 373 
 
MARIANA 
 
 The writer's "dear love" at this stage of his corre- 
 spondence with Pembroke is matter of irony only. The 
 sonnet is a whole series of ironical negatives, under the 
 guise of which we are told the history of a certain child. 
 It was *' the child of State " ; it was " unfathered," or 
 deserted by its real father, so that it became Fortune's 
 bastard, or anybody's child. It was thrown out as a 
 weed, when it might have been gathered as a flower. 
 It suffered under " smiling pomp," and [with the 
 mother] under the blow of " thralled discontent." This 
 love-child [and the love which bore it] had nothing to 
 hope, much to fear, from Policy, that Heretic, "which 
 works on leases of short-number 'd hours." Policy was 
 hugely politic, like a huge pole standing stiffly aloof. 
 The infant which had grown with heat was drowned 
 with showers ; but the pole was insensible to both, 
 affected neither by inward feeling nor another's tears. 
 In witness whereof he calls the foals of Time, the casual 
 offspring, which die for the good of those by whose 
 crime they had life. 
 
 The key to the identity is the word printed in 
 italics with a capital — "^oYicy, xhst Heretic." Heretic 
 in those days might mean a Puritan, as in Ben Jonson's 
 definition, Puritanus Hypocritica est Haereticus, etc. 
 But there is a double meaning, the second sense being 
 the original Greek one of " free to choose," which is 
 implied in the lines : 
 
 As subject to Time's love or to Time's hate. 
 
 Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gather'd. 
 
 I submit that the whole sonnet points to Mr. Comp- 
 troller unmistakably, if very darkly. Firstly, he was 
 a " heretic " in the above sense of Puritan, being the 
 son of a Puritan and carefully brought up by a tutor 
 who suffered in the Marian persecutions. Secondly, 
 he was at the same time a courtier noted for his 
 " policy." His motto, as on his engraved portrait, 
 was curiously apt to his politic nature, " In utrumque 
 
 374 
 
" POLICY, THAT HERETIC " 
 
 paratus,'' his bland and sedate features (" smiling 
 pomp ") harmonising well both with motto and reputa- 
 tion. Thirdly, there is a pun in " policy," in respect 
 of the pole or white staff which he carried as the emblem 
 of his office in the Household. The same jest of 
 " pole " and " policy " reappears more than once with 
 Polonius, whose name means the man with the pole. 
 
 The next sonnet, 125, contains the sequel and con- 
 clusion of the unfathered-child incident, namely, the 
 quarrel with Lord Pembroke on account of suborned 
 information which " impeached " the poet himself. 
 Some one must have had an intelligible motive for 
 suborning the information. Now Polonius has a whole 
 scene given to him for the purpose of exhibiting him as 
 a suborner of information, so as to "impeach" (the 
 word is actually used in the first quarto but changed in 
 the second) the conduct of his son in Paris in matters 
 of the same indelicate kind. But the question of 
 Polonius must be reserved for the next chapter. 
 
 The person pointed at in the 124th Sonnet may be 
 taken to have held aloof ; but it may seem unnecessary 
 to infer that he was under any particular obligation to 
 come forward. Here we have the means of hearing 
 the other side. KnoUys himself adverts, in more than 
 one letter, to the unhappy event which seemed for a 
 time to have ruined his prospects of married happiness 
 with Mrs. Fitton. He had done his best, he writes, to 
 be " the true husbandman," but " the man of sin " 
 sowed tares in the night. " The man of sin " is 
 such a phrase as a Puritan might have been expected 
 to use ; in its original meaning of " the mystery of 
 iniquity " it is even felicitous, for the identity of the 
 party is hinted at as darkly as in the famous passage 
 of Second Thessalonians. Some one, however, was in 
 the writer's mind, for he uses the definite article ; 
 and it is almost implied that his correspondent was in 
 the secret. Her sister's loves were complicated : she 
 had three Wills. Shakespeare's last reference to the 
 
 375 
 
MARIANA 
 
 matter is in the last sonnet of the series written to his 
 mistress, the 152nd. Assuming it to correspond in 
 date with the close of the other series to Lord Pembroke, 
 it was written after her mishap and disgrace : 
 
 In loving thee thou know'st I am forsworn ; 
 But thou art twice forsworn to me love swearing : 
 In act thy bed-vow broke, and new faith torn ; 
 In vowing new hate after new love bearing. 
 
 These lines are full of his peculiar wit, irrepressible 
 even when his matter is serious. They are not simply 
 antithetic, but doubly so, the ideas being as compacted 
 as the symbols of an algebraical formula, but also as 
 exact and separable. His own forswearing is a simple 
 matter — his infidelity to his wife at Stratford. But in 
 swearing love to him, at that late date, the lady was 
 forsworn in a very intricate way. The second respect 
 in which she was forsworn, in the fourth line, was " in 
 vowing new hate after new love bearing." Bearing is 
 here literally " giving birth to" ; and that had happened 
 twice — recently and formerly. The old occasion was 
 her still-born child in the spring of 1 600, " the forward 
 violet" of S. 99, which was the fruit of her amour 
 with Lord Herbert. There is no direct evidence that 
 she bore his lordship hate after it ; but it may be 
 inferred that their relations ceased ; and it was known 
 to Shakespeare that Lord Pembroke was not the father 
 of the second child. The same thing happened with 
 that : she bore hatred to its father. This is the dualism, 
 and these the antitheses, of the fourth line ; the same 
 moral paradox occurred twice — she bore a love-child 
 and hated the father of it. She was " forsworn "in an 
 intransitive sense — not to any one. The other forswear- 
 ing, in the third line, was of the same kind, and also a 
 dualism — "in act thy bed-vow broke and new faith torn." 
 This it was which preceded the " new love bearing." 
 Therein she had broken her " bed-vow," and torn up her 
 " new faith," which may have meant the fresh start after 
 her first mishap. But what was her "bed- vow"? 
 
 376 
 
"THY BED-VOW BROKE" 
 
 Shakespeare uses elsewhere the words "vow," "bed- 
 right," and the like, but "bed-vow" only this once. 
 It cannot mean a nuptial vow, but a prenuptial, the 
 implication of which was " no bed-right to be paid," as 
 he makes plain by other words in Prospero's admonition 
 to Ferdinand after his betrothal to Miranda in 'The 
 Tempest.' Mistress Fitton had such a prenuptial con- 
 tract with Sir William Knollys, and had broken it — 
 with whom ? The words " in act " are an antithesis 
 which means that the vow was broken by the respective 
 parties to it between themselves; That hypothesis gives 
 a consistent meaning to all that is said of the matter, 
 both directly in the Sonnets and obliquely in the plays. 
 But it is at variance with KnoUys's accusation of the 
 " man of sin " ; and there is only a little of documentary 
 evidence which may enable one to judge between the 
 two sides. It is not necessary, for the understanding of 
 Shakespeare's occult meaning, that we should form any 
 opinion on the merits. He believed that he was upon 
 firm ground of fact, and it is clear from the 119th 
 Sonnet that the lady gave him some startling informa- 
 tion. His conviction was clear, both as to the primary 
 guilt of Knollys and as to his "lack of temper'd 
 judgement afterward" in shielding himself behind a 
 plausible accusation of" the man of sin." And he took 
 his scenic revenge in creating the part of Polonius, 
 which reads to us now as if he must have enjoyed 
 the writing of it. 
 
 The little external evidence that there is consists of 
 these facts : that Mistress Fitton did show coldness, if 
 not dislike and hate, to Sir William Knollys after her 
 disgrace, and that he himself did use the language of 
 compunction at a later period, offering to renew his 
 engagement as if to make amends. His attitude at the 
 time of her fall is nowhere indicated. It happened that 
 he was then preoccupied with a great affair of State, the 
 trial of his nephew. Lord Essex, for treason, which 
 happened in the very same weeks of February 1601 
 
 377 
 
MARIANA 
 
 in which the Fitton scandal became known. Mr. 
 Comptroller was one of the Queen's most trusted 
 counsellors ; he earned her gratitude for his conduct in 
 the Essex business, and had the honour of entertaining 
 her Majesty at his country house near Caversham in the 
 autumn of the same year. The exigencies of his position 
 in the State may have made it impossible for him to 
 help his fiancee. But it appears that his correspondent, 
 Lady Newdigate, who received all his confidences about 
 her sister, had not been writing to him, or had ceased 
 writing to him, at the time of the family trouble, and 
 that KnoUys sent a message to her, through her great- 
 uncle in London, that he wished to hear from her. 
 After Mistress Fitton had gone to her sister, KnoUys 
 wrote : " How much more unhappy am I, who though 
 with all the care and industry I can use to bring this 
 soil to her former goodness, yet it is impossible for 
 me to prevail. And, God knows, I would refuse no 
 penance to redeem what is lost. I write not this to 
 grieve her whom I have so much loved, nor your good 
 self; for there can be no greater punishment to me 
 than to be a cause of either your sadness." Non liquet. 
 But why does he speak at all of his penance and punish- 
 ment .? His letters abound in metaphors and allegories, 
 but he knew the correct use of words. 
 
 The conduct of Angelo to Mariana in the play h^s 
 a certain resemblance to this real case. Shakespeare 
 found in the old ballad a contract broken off on purely 
 mercenary grounds, because the lady's dowry had been 
 lost in a trading venture. He raised the social status 
 of parties above the trading class, and, as he wished for 
 some reason to keep this loss of the dowry as a minor 
 motive, he made it to be lost at sea with the lady's 
 brother, who was a " great soldier." But the contract 
 was broken off " chiefly " because Angelo " pretended 
 in her discoveries of dishonour." He left her, but the 
 circumstances of his leaving her were not generally 
 known ; for example, Isabella did not know them : 
 
 37« 
 
A REAL CASE 
 
 Lab. Can this be so ? did Angelo so leave her ? 
 
 Duke. Left her in her tears, and dried not one of them with 
 his comfort ; swallowed his vows whole, pretending in her dis- 
 coveries of dishonour ; in few, bestowed her on her own lamenta- 
 tion, which she yet wears for his sake ; and he, a marble to her 
 tears, is washed with them, but relents not. 
 
 Isab. What a merit were it in death to take this poor maid 
 from the world ! What corruption in this life, that it will let this 
 man live ! 
 
 " He a marble to her tears, is washed with them, but 
 relents not " is a peculiar phrase which can hardly be 
 matched except in the language of S. 124, the pole 
 stuck in the ground, which neither " grows with heat 
 nor drowns with showers." 
 
 Angelo's lapse from his austere virtue, his own 
 breach of the obsolete law which he had presumed to 
 revive, is, of course, carried out under the conditions of 
 the plot. But the circumstances of the assignation are 
 given with a curious particularity, which is not called 
 for by way of picturesqueness, and need not have been 
 so minute in the mouth of Isabella in order to be real. 
 There is just a suggestion of these details of locality in 
 the ballad of "The Happy Adventure" — a garden 
 gate, one pair of stairs, and a chamber next to the 
 bower. In Whetstone's original, Cassandra simply 
 repairs to the house of Promos in the disguise of a 
 page. But this is a description of some actual place 
 known to the writer : 
 
 Duke. What is the news of this good deputy ? 
 
 Isab. He hath a garden circummured with brick. 
 Whose western side is with a vineyard back'd : 
 And to that vineyard is a planched gate. 
 That makes his opening with this bigger key : 
 This other doth command a little door 
 Which from the vineyard to the garden leads. 
 There have I made my promise 
 Upon the heavy middle of the night 
 To call upon him. 
 
 The time of Mistress Fitton's mishap, which had so 
 far-reaching consequences, can be assigned, in the usual 
 
 379 
 
MARIANA 
 
 way of reckoning, to midsummer 1600. It has been 
 matter of conjecture before (by Mrs. Stopes in the 
 Shakespeare JahrbUcher, 1890) that the actual occasion 
 of it was the festivities attending the marriage of another 
 of the maids-of-honour, Mistress Bess Russell, at Black- 
 friars, in the middle of June. The Court was at 
 Greenwich, and came up, all the maids-of-honour and 
 the great officers of State, in eighteen coaches to grace 
 the wedding, the Queen herself attending. The marriage 
 was on Monday, the Queen stayed the night at the 
 house of Lord Cobham, and returned to Greenwich on 
 Tuesday, leaving nearly all her suite to continue the 
 gaieties until Thursday. It was Mistress Fitton's moment 
 of highest feather. She led the masque, and had the 
 honour of giving her hand to the old Queen herself to 
 join in the dance. When her Majesty asked her alle- 
 gorical name in the masque, she answered " Affection," 
 although it was really something else ; to which the 
 Queen wittily replied, " Affection is false." In these un- 
 guarded hours of gaiety and elation, she yielded to the 
 solicitation of some one, who did not find it convenient 
 to "justify" her when the time came. The child was 
 " the child of State." The mother was a maid-of- 
 honour, the father probably a courtier also. He corre- 
 sponds to the personage in the 124th Sonnet, and to 
 the Lord Angelo of the play, who did " slip so grossly 
 in the heat of blood and in lack of temper'd judgement 
 afterward." Probably we should not have heard of 
 him, nor had such a problem to deal with as the pardon 
 of Angelo in the play, had it not been that Shakespeare 
 himself was a party in the case. We understand why 
 the ethics of ' Measure for Measure ' are empirical as 
 soon as we discover real persons behind the parts of 
 Angelo, Mariana, and the disguised duke. 
 
 380 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 hamlet's revenge 
 
 The first time that Hamlet opens his mouth, it is to 
 utter a dark oracle — " A little more than kin and less 
 than kind." After the plot has proceeded half-way, he 
 announces again, this time in the plainest terms, that 
 there is an undivulged secret : " You would pluck out 
 the heart of my mystery." Even if ' Hamlet ' were not 
 thus declared to be a riddle, the enormous amount of 
 writing upon it, firom so various points of view, would 
 confess the fact. It is at once an enigma and a good 
 acting play. Schlegel and others have been surprised 
 at the success of the piece upon the stage, considering 
 the amount of mystery in it. It is not unlikely, how- 
 ever, that Shakespeare reckoned from the first upon 
 holding the attention of the public by that very element 
 of mystery. His great rival, Ben Jonson, did not 
 think that deep wit was legitimate upon the stage. In 
 conversing with Drummond, at Hawthornden, in 1619, 
 he appealed to the authority of Horace, Turpe est 
 difficiles amare nugas ; and in his own work he was 
 plain enough to be understood by any one at the time. 
 Against the authority of Horace may be set the example 
 of Aristophanes, much of whose wit and obscure allusion 
 is said to have escaped even the sharp-witted Athenians 
 themselves, although they expected no less than to have 
 their sharp palates gratified. The Elizabethan age was 
 the great age of English wit, and Shakespeare was the 
 wittiest of all that nimble company. As it was the 
 
 381 
 
HAMLET'S REVENGE 
 
 Athenian audience that put Aristophanes upon his 
 mettle, so there were always some among Shakespeare's 
 hearers who would encourage him to try how deep and 
 subtle he could be (notably the two persons for whom 
 he wrote the Sonnets). According to Francis Beaumont, 
 in the verses which he wrote for Ben Jonson's Fox 
 in 1605, it had become an affectation to admire the 
 obscure and unintelligible : 
 
 But since our subtle gallants think it good 
 To like of naught that may be understood, 
 Lest they should be disproved. 
 
 This taste of the time, as well as Shakespeare's more 
 than willingness to gratify it, should account for what 
 Hallam thought a blemish in his work : "It is im- 
 possible to deny that innumerable lines in Shakespeare 
 were not more intelligible in his time than they are at 
 present. Can we justify the very numerous passages 
 which yield to no interpretation, knots which are never 
 unloosed, which conjecture does but cut ? " Can we 
 justify the whole play of ' Hamlet ' 1 A vast literature 
 of books, papers, and editorial notes is the somewhat 
 ambiguous answer. No fabled riddle of the ancient 
 world has ever so held men's attention. Shakespeare 
 did well for his own fame in making his play Hamlet's 
 mystery, although there have not been wanting critics 
 to maintain that it does not add to his real reputation. 
 
 It is not out of the question, that the great vogue 
 of ' Hamlet ' as a philosophic problem has been a con- 
 tingency which the author did not foresee. This is not 
 to say, as some have said, that he threw it off easily, as 
 if he were unconscious of his own depth and unconscious 
 of intellectual effort ; a comparison of the first quarto 
 with the second will show how careful and minute his 
 touches had been ; and what he perfected so carefully, he 
 wrote with deep intent. But it does not follow that he 
 was always conscious of that deep philosophy of life which 
 is certainly present in two or three of the soliloquies, 
 
 382 
 
AN ENIGMA CONFESSED 
 
 and is sought for by German and other critics through- 
 out the whole plan and action of the piece ; such an 
 abstract purpose, for example, as Professor Karl Werder 
 finds in it, die Darstellung der Gerechtigkeit auf 
 Erden, the exhibition of justice upon the earth. Goethe 
 has left, in the Conversations with Eckermann, a view 
 of the author's method, which is likely enough to be 
 right, so far as it goes, inasmuch as one imaginative 
 genius will see into the mind of another : 
 
 " Shakespeare was inspired with the first thought of 
 his ' Hamlet ' when the spirit of the whole presented 
 itself to his mind as an unexpected impression, and he 
 surveyed the several situations, characters, and conclu- 
 sion in an elevated mood, as a pure gift from above, on 
 which he had no immediate influence, although the 
 possibility of conceiving such a thought certainly pre- 
 supposed a mind such as his. But the individual scenes, 
 and the dialogue of the characters, he had completely 
 in his power, so that he might produce them dally and 
 hourly, and work at them for weeks if he liked." 
 
 This inspired or " unexpected " impression upon his 
 mind was reproduced in its entirety in the first quarto 
 (1603), which, although little more than half the length 
 of the second (1604), contains the whole of the action, 
 all the enigmatic talk and songs of the lunatic Ophelia 
 (save a couple of lines), and all the enigmatic conduct 
 and speeches of Hamlet, with the exception of two inter- 
 polated remarks. What Goethe supposes he saw as if in a 
 flash during one of his elevated moods, he produced on 
 the stage in the summer of 1 602 as a complete action, 
 from which he never varied except to remove certain 
 appearances of inconsistency, or, at all events, to try to 
 remove them. What was this unity which he saw as 
 in a vision from beginning to end ^ What was " the 
 spirit of the whole," which "presented itself to his 
 mind as an unexpected impression " 1 We are safe to 
 answer, in the first place, that it was Kyd's old play of 
 Hamlefs Revenge which came into his mind, a play 
 
 383 
 
HAMLET'S REVENGE 
 
 which had been on the boards in London for a dozen 
 years or more, and was so familiar that the name of 
 Hamlet had become proverbial for a revengeful madman. 
 Secondly, one may be almost as sure that he was not 
 merely casting about for a new subject, but that the 
 revenge theme was what he specially wanted. Thirdly, 
 and most nearly to the point of Goethe's question, the 
 spirit of the whole, as it presented itself to him in a 
 moment of exaltation, was the idea of executing revenge 
 by cunning or mystification, which was indeed the idea 
 of the old Hamlet legend. Develop this germinal idea 
 of enigmatic purpose, and we begin to see a design. 
 He might have called his new piece the Riddle of 
 the Sphinx, a riddle in five acts, as much a riddle at 
 last as at first, and a riddle both of the hero and the 
 heroine. 
 
 The use of enigma in tragedy had been introduced 
 upon the Attic stage. In comedy the Errors was a 
 favourite subject, and Shakespeare himself had used it 
 with more than classical ingenuity. Although the enigma 
 in the opening scene of 'Pericles' is not his, and is 
 dropped at once as impracticable, yet he must have 
 known the intention of it. He makes Don Armado 
 refer learnedly to enigma, and, in a not distant context, 
 to Samson and Delilah. Every one knew Samson's 
 riddle, and every reflective person knew the principle 
 upon which it was constructed : it turns ostensibly upon 
 a unique incident known only to himself, which no 
 one could possibly guess, — a bees' nest built inside the 
 skeleton of a lion which Samson himself had killed 
 and concealed. In this classical example the enigma 
 is insoluble until we are told the facts in Samson's 
 exclusive possession, and then it is no enigma at all. 
 What was good enough for Samson was good enough 
 for Shakespeare. Out of incidents or experiences known 
 only to himself, or at least unknown to his audience or 
 his readers, he could construct a dramatic riddle, which 
 would remain a riddle until the matters of fact were 
 
 384 
 
NEW FACTS 
 
 known (if they should ever be) ; and then it would be 
 no riddle at all.-' 
 
 Although it is still usual in writings upon Shake- 
 speare of the very latest date to say that little new 
 about his life has been found out since Malone's great 
 harvest of documents more than a century ago, ex- 
 cepting the discovery of his marriage bond, yet there 
 have been two notable discoveries, within the last half- 
 dozen years, which will be seen ere long in their full 
 importance. The first of these was the discovery by 
 Lady Newdigate-Newdegate, in the muniment-room at 
 Arbury Hall, of a series of fourteen letters written by 
 Sir William Knollys, Comptroller of Queen Elizabeth's 
 Household, to the first Lady Newdigate, from which it 
 is clear that Sir William was the avowed suitor and 
 expectant husband of that lady's younger sister, Mary 
 Fitton, otherwise known to fame as a mistress of Lord 
 Pembroke, and suspected to have been the Dark Lady 
 of the Sonnets. As soon as this correspondence was 
 printed in 1897, it was perceived by Mr. William 
 Archer that Sir William Knollys, the lover of Mary 
 Fitton, fell naturally into the place of the third Will in 
 the Sonnets, the other two being William Herbert, Lord 
 Pembroke, and William the poet himself. But it was 
 still denied by some among the partisans of the several 
 hypotheses of the Sonnets that the male person addressed 
 in them was actually William Herbert. His identity is 
 really the keystone of an arch of probabilities. Here 
 comes in the second of the recent documentary dis- 
 coveries, which was made by myself, and has been dealt 
 with at the beginning of Chapter III., namely, that the 
 disgraced maid -of- honour, the White Doe, Mistress 
 
 ' Although Samson's riddle on the surface is one that cannot be guessed 
 until a certain private incident has been divulged, and is thereafter so jejune 
 that it is not really a riddle at all, yet it would hardly be in the Book of 
 Judges unless it had a deeper meaning. I have ventured upon a theory of 
 it in a recent paper, "On Indications of the Hachisch Vice in the Old 
 Testament," in a journal for the history of medicine, Janus (Haarlem), 
 viii. June 1903. 
 
 385 2 
 
HAMLET'S REVENGE 
 
 Fitton, had been the mistress of " the clown " before 
 " Pembrooke strook her down," which is exactly the 
 situation of Shakespeare's mistress in the Sonnets. 
 What the Arbury letters proved was, that her third 
 lover was Sir William Knollys, the Comptroller of the 
 Household. We should never have known that Knollys 
 was the lover and the prospective husband of Shake- 
 speare's Dark Lady but for the publication of his 
 fourteen letters seven years ago ; Knollys had asked his 
 correspondent to burn them, but the request had not 
 been attended to, as often happens ; and so we are in 
 possession of a Shakespearian secret, which is not only 
 the key to the later of the sonnets, in both the male and 
 female series, but the key to two of the great plays. 
 One of these, ' Measure for Measure,' I have taken out 
 of its chronological order so as to state the matters of 
 fact and of probability between Sir William Knollys and 
 Mistress Fitton, and so as to clear the way for the 
 earlier, more vindictive, and thoroughly enigmatic 
 handling of the same theme in ' Hamlet.' Premising all 
 that has been advanced under the heads of the Sonnets 
 and of ' Measure for Measure ' concerning Mistress 
 Fitton's three lovers, and the disputed paternity of that 
 unwelcome infant which brought so much trouble to so 
 many, I come to the same matters of fact as underlying 
 the enigma of ' Hamlet ' — matters within the private 
 knowledge of the author, out of which he constructed a 
 dramatic riddle on the same principle as Samson's. 
 
 Any one reading the old Hamlet legend, whether in 
 the original Latin of Saxo Grammaticus or in the nearly 
 literal French of Belleforest, will be impressed by one 
 scene in particular as the most vivid, as well as the 
 most characteristic, of the whole : it is the scene where 
 Hamlet enters to have the interview with his mother. 
 He enters with his nose in the air ; instead of making 
 his salutation to his mother, he walks deliberately to a 
 corner of the room in which is a heap of cushions, or 
 coverings of some kind {stramentum). He jumps upon 
 
 386 
 
CORAMBIS 
 
 the heap and begins flapping his arms like a cock his 
 wings upon a dunghill ; something stirs under the 
 weight of his feet, whereupon he draws his weapon and 
 drives it through the heap until the point sticks in the 
 floor ; there is a groan, and a trickling, of blood from 
 under the heap ; he drags out a man's body, quarters it, 
 and sends the pieces to be boiled in a cauldron and 
 thrown to the pigs. The victim is the counsellor, who 
 is in attendance upon the queen to hear what passes. 
 Hamlet is aware of his presence by intuition, and treats 
 him with barbaric contempt, the moral being. So perish 
 all eavesdroppers. 
 
 CoRAMBIS 
 
 The counsellor is unnamed, and had not appeared in 
 the story before. When the legend was dramatised in 
 London, about 1589 or earlier, his part had almost 
 certainly been developed, and he had received a name ; 
 but no one knows what his name was, what part was 
 given him, or whether he had a son, or a daughter, or 
 both. Shakespeare erected him into a part of the first 
 rank, and called him originally Corambis, which was 
 changed two years after (in 1604) into Polonius, which 
 means the Pole, or the man with the pole, from his white 
 staffs or pole of office as chamberlain, or treasurer, or 
 comptroller of the household. The name Corambis 
 has never been traced. It is entered in the great Ono- 
 masticon, or Dictionary of Proper Names, by Forcellini, 
 with a cross-reference to " Crambis " ; but on looking 
 for Crambis, one can find no such entry, so that 
 Forcellini was obviously at fault. The name has all 
 the look of a new coinage, and may be confidently 
 derived from Coram nobis, "before us," a synecdoche 
 for the magistrate who had poor wretches haled before 
 him, "coram nobis," as in Whetstone's Promos ana 
 Cassandra} Shakespeare uses the prepositional half, 
 
 1 In Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra (1578), which Shakespeare was 
 using for the plot of ' Measure for Measure ' about the same time that he 
 
 387 
 
HAMLET'S REVENGE 
 
 Coram, as one of the titles of Justice Shallow in the 
 opening scene of the ' Merry Wives of Windsor.' But 
 why should Coram-nobis be a suitable name for one in 
 the position of Polonius, who had no magisterial duties ? 
 The answer to that question will reveal a good deal 
 more than might have been expected from its minor 
 importance and merely curious interest. 
 
 Amongst the various titles and dignities of Justice 
 Shallow in the opening scene of ' The Merry Wives of 
 Windsor,' that of Coram recalls the fact that he was a 
 magistrate, as well as the tradition that he was the magis- 
 trate before whom Shakespeare himself had once been 
 cited. Whether it was only an affair of stealing Lucy's 
 own deer, or something more, it can hardly be doubted 
 that Shakespeare bore a grudge against the Justice, so 
 that he satirised him in two of his plays, in the ' Merry 
 Wives' within the legitimate limits of a jest, but in 
 ' 2 Henry IV.' in a malicious caricature, which was not 
 printed until a few weeks after Sir Thomas Lucy's 
 death in the summer of 1600. Therefore, when we 
 find the same suggestion of a magisterial inquisition in 
 the name Corambis, we are led to think of something 
 else rankling in the author's mind. According to his 
 own statement in the 125th Sonnet, he had been 
 " impeacht " in the matter of Mistress Fitton by an 
 " informer " who had been " suborned." AU the terms 
 
 was writing 'Hamlet' (see p. 3 J 3), the idea of fishing is associated with an 
 examining magistrate, just as it is associated with Polonius, or Corambis, as 
 " a fishmonger," or an employer of others to fish. The following is the 
 passage, spoken by Phallax, a corrupt justice : 
 
 While favours last, then good, I fish for gain ; 
 
 (For grace will not bite always at my bait) j 
 
 And, as I wish, at hand good fortune see : 
 
 Here come Rapax and Gripax ; but what's this ? 
 
 As good as fair handsel God grant it be. 
 
 The knaves bring a woman coram mbii. 
 
 In the old German version of ' Hamlet,' Der bestraffle Brudermord, a 
 performance of which, at Dresden, can be traced as far back as 1626 (printed 
 text no farther than_i7io), the parts are essentially Shakespearian ; the name 
 of the chamberlain is Corambus, Ophelia is Ofelia, Leartes is Leonhardus, 
 and Osric is Phantasmo ; while the king and queen are given Danish or 
 Norse names. 
 
 388 
 
DR. JULIUS C^SAR 
 
 are legal ; and the natural sequel to them would have 
 been " cited " and " examined," as we know that Lord 
 Pembroke had been at an earlier stage of the same 
 filiation inquiry, which was almost bound to go on until 
 some one had been made out to be the father. 
 
 The law officer of the Crown who attended to any 
 justiciary business arising within the Queen's household 
 was the Master of the Court of Requests, at that time a 
 distinguished jurist and scholar. Dr. Julius Cassar, who 
 became Chancellor of the Exchequer under James. 
 According to the words of the patent of his appointment 
 by Elizabeth, 29th October 1596, he was to receive 
 "a fee of one hundred guineas per annum, in con- 
 sideration of his attendance on her Majesty's person 
 and in the Court of Requests."^ As the law officer 
 attending on her Majesty's person, it would have fallen 
 to him to investigate the filiation case which had arisen 
 within the household : the examination of Lord Pembroke 
 in the same matter had been conducted with sufficient 
 formality for Sir Robert Cecil to know of it, and of the 
 first result of it ; and it would ordinarily have been 
 conducted by the Master of the Requests. Assuming 
 that this was the matter in which Shakespeare was 
 " impeacht " at the moment when his lordship was 
 discharged, he also would have been haled in his turn 
 before Dr. Julius Caesar. There is, of course, no 
 evidence that he was ; is it likely that any documentary 
 proof of such a fact should remain ? I have searched 
 through the index of the numerous MS. memoranda 
 left by Dr. Caesar, and among his letters to Cecil ; but 
 his notes relate chiefly to cases in the Admiralty Court, 
 and one sees that any record of a private scandal 
 afi^ecting a maid-of-honour and a player is hardly to be 
 looked for in such formal company. 
 
 Shakespeare could have borne no such grudge 
 against Dr. Julius Caesar as he did against Sir Thomas 
 
 1 Lodge's Life of Sir Julius Ccesar. London, 1812. On loth May 
 1 600 he became the senior Master of Requests. 
 
 389 
 
HAMLET'S REVENGE 
 
 Lucy, if only for the reason that it was not the law 
 officer of the household who had impeached him ; he 
 had been impeached by an informer, who had been 
 suborned. Now in ' Hamlet,' Corambis is painted at 
 full length, in the opening scene of the second Act, as a 
 suborner, skilled in the arts of subornation ; the scene 
 is introduced mainly in order to exhibit him in that 
 odious light, for nothing turns upon it afterwards ; he 
 instructs his emissary Montanus (afterwards Reynoldo, 
 Edward Reynolds, clerk of the Court of Requests) how 
 to set about procuring information from Danskers in 
 Paris in order to bring home to his own son, Laertes, 
 those specific acts of loose living which he thought ante- 
 cedently probable. The general principle is summed 
 up in the line : 
 
 Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth. 
 
 When Hamlet next meets Corambis, he surprises him 
 by telling him " Y'are a fishmonger," that is to say, a 
 dealer in what had been fished for, an employer of men 
 to fish for him. But why did he give the name of an 
 examining magistrate, Coram-nohis, or Corambis, to a 
 courtier who is indeed represented as a suborner of 
 false information, but has no inquisitorial duties } The 
 singular fact that the name was changed after two 
 years to Polonius, the man with the pole or white 
 staff of office, which is an appropriate name for a 
 chamberlain, should mean that there was some quirk or 
 double intention in the original name. Corambis was 
 the name given to a person to whom it was inappro- 
 priate, in order to include within him the idea of an 
 absent person to whom the name properly belonged. 
 This idea of inclusion, or of the chamberlain in the 
 play containing or covering another personality who is 
 not in the play, is brought out by a curious incident in 
 the dialogue, which is otherwise meaningless. In the 
 third Act, just before the play within the play begins, 
 
 39° 
 
DR. JULIUS C^SAR 
 
 Hamlet turns to Corambis with the remark, not un- 
 suited to the occasion : 
 
 Ham. My lord, you played once i' the university, you say ? 
 
 Cor. That did I, my lord ; and was accounted a good actor. 
 
 Ham. What did you enact ? 
 
 Cor. I did enact Julius Caesar : I was killed i' the Capitol ; 
 Brutus killed me. 
 
 Ham. It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf 
 there. 
 
 This is Doctor Julius Cassar, who is personated by 
 Corambis for the occasion, and made to be killed in a 
 play, or in the reminiscence of a play brought up while 
 waiting to witness a play within a play. It is a scenic 
 revenge in the third remove, or as near as Shakespeare 
 cared to bring it. Hamlet ends with a remark which 
 contains two puns and an alliteration, the whole being 
 meant as a flout to Corambis, and a plain indication 
 that Hamlet was mad. Every one laughs when Hamlet 
 turns away from Polonius with the words " so capital 
 a calf." But where is the point } Why calf? Why 
 insult him at all ? What has this capable statesman 
 done, the indispensable counsellor of the Danish 
 monarchy, the trusted minister of the new king as of the 
 old, this " good old man " as the queen calls him — 
 what has he done to incur Hamlet's invariable gibes 
 and insults ? 
 
 Polonius 
 
 Although Polonius is often played as a doddering 
 old man, a forcible -feeble, a proper butt for Hamlet's 
 satire both in his person and his character, yet the 
 discerning critics, Goethe, Tieck, Charles Lamb, and 
 Maginn, make him out to have been a capable states- 
 man, experienced and thoughtful, if somewhat pedantic. 
 Lamb remarks that, in all the Hamlets whom he had 
 seen, the contemptuous treatment of Polonius has been 
 exaggerated, and he might have added that the character 
 of the chamberlain is made contemptible to suit. He 
 
 391 
 
HAMLET'S REVENGE 
 
 is aggrieved that what he calls the " temporary deformi- 
 ties " in Hamlet's conduct should be so emphasised ; 
 but he does not tell us how else the actor could have 
 played with fidelity to the text.-' Hamlet never misses 
 a chance of gibing at him. In his " lecture and advice " 
 to Reynoldo he is made petty and contemptible in an 
 amusing way. His mannerisms are brought out for 
 laughter, including a certain way of talking, which must 
 have been drawn from the life. He is a subtle politician, 
 with a store of moral tags. Warburton guessed that 
 he read from a table-book the famous maxims which 
 he delivered to Laertes. At that time neither of the 
 two known copies of the first quarto had been found ; 
 but that edition confirms Warburton's conjecture in a 
 very curious way, the whole of the maxims being 
 printed as quotation, within inverted commas, excepting 
 the two lines upon the dress of the Parisians, which are 
 so different from the rest in their halting style that the 
 editors suspect a corruption of the text : 
 
 And they in France of the chief rank and station 
 Are of a most select and general chief in that. 
 
 After this extempore interpolation, the quotation marks 
 were resumed. So also in the admonition of Polonius 
 to Ophelia, the copy-book maxims are set in inverted 
 commas in the original text : 
 
 1 Lamb had "never seen a player in this character [Hamlet] who did 
 not exaggerate and strain to the utmost these ambiguous features — these 
 temporary deformities in his character. They make him express a vulgar 
 scorn of Polonius which utterly degrades his gentility, and which no 
 explanation can render palatable ; they make him show contempt, and curl 
 up the nose at Ophelia's father — contempt in its very grossest and most 
 hateful form ; but they get applause by it : it is natural, people say ; that 
 is, the words are scornful, and the actor expresses scorn, and that they can 
 judge of But why so much scorn, and of that sort, they never think of 
 asking." It is hardly the business of an actor to " think of asking " why 
 the book indicates scorn ; it is enough for him that it does so consistendy. 
 The critic himself, if he has indeed thought of asking, has given a merely 
 empirical and random answer — "ambiguous features," "temporary de- 
 formities," in Hamlet's character. 
 
 392 
 
POLONIUS 
 
 Ofelia, receive none of his letters, 
 
 ' For lovers' lines are snares to intrap the heart. 
 
 ' Refuse his tokens, both of them are keyes 
 
 To unlocke Chastitie unto Desire : 
 
 Come in, Ofelia, such men often prove 
 
 ' Great in their wordes, but little in their love. 
 
 It was not unusual to preserve such gems of wisdom 
 and wit in table-books ; and Polonius is made to com- 
 municate them to his son and daughter in the manner 
 of a pigeon feeding its young. 
 
 One of the most significant marks in Polonius is his 
 physique. He is old, but it is carefully implied that he 
 does not look old : that is the meaning of the 
 " heresies," or the " slanders," which Hamlet reads from 
 the book of " the satirical rogue," who " says here, that 
 old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, 
 their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum, 
 and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together 
 with most weak hams." In the original, first quarto, 
 the signs of old age, " all which, sir, I most potently 
 believe not," are hollow eyes, weak backs, grey beards, 
 pitiful weak hams, gouty legs. It is sometimes as diffi- 
 cult to guess the precise meaning of irony as it is always 
 to answer it ; but the point of reading slanders from 
 the satirical book seems to be that these, the conven- 
 tional signs of old age, were not true of Polonius ; he 
 is complimented ironically upon his vigour and virility. 
 This is the same wit that is used upon Adrian in ' The 
 Tempest,' in the wager about " the old cock " and " the 
 cockerel" (see p. 98). 
 
 It was true of one statesman of that period. Sir 
 William KnoUys. In 1603 he was about sixty, an age 
 which few statesmen of that time exceeded ; but he must 
 have been remarkably well preserved or youthful-looking ; 
 for he lived to the age of eighty-nine or nearly, and was 
 so agile that he rode out on horseback until within a 
 few months of his death. He is the " parti-beard " of 
 the ballad quoted before, which probably means that his 
 
 393 
 
HAMLET'S REVENGE 
 
 beard was of mixed colour in 1601. His engraved 
 portrait, taken after 16 16, when he was Master of the 
 Wards and Viscount Wallingford, shows him without 
 a wrinkle in his face, with full, clear, steady eyes, a 
 close-trimmed beard, and, one would infer, an erect 
 figure ; although he was then seventy-three, or more, 
 he might pass for a man of fifty or sixty. Polonius 
 would be as old as Hamlet if, like a crab, he could 
 go backward — as, indeed, he could do very well in 
 performing his duties of chamberlain.^ The irony of 
 all this as applied to KnoUys becomes intelligible in 
 the light of the disputed paternity of Mistress Fitton's 
 child. Without that clue, or some other such if it can 
 be found, the innuendoes aimed at Polonius are merely 
 Hamlet's madness — madness without method. 
 
 ' Joseph Hunter [^Nenu Illustrations, 1 845, ii. 219) has the following : 
 — " That there was some individual nobleman more particularly pointed at 
 in the character of Polonius, I can entertain no doubt, nor that some atten- 
 tive observer of the men of those times will one day trace the poet home. 
 Could it be the Lord Chamberlain? Prynne alludes to the practice of 
 bringing living noblemen upon the stage, and names particularly the Lord 
 Admiral, the Lord Treasurer, and Count Gondemar as persons with whom 
 the stage had made free." The Lord Chamberlain (Hunsdon) in the year 
 1602 would have made a good subject for a stage portrait (had there been 
 any motive, or had it been safe, to exhibit him), according to the following 
 sketch of him in the unprinted ballad (by Churchyard ?) already cited, 
 which may be repeated in this context : 
 
 Chamberlin, Chamberlin, 
 He's of her Grace's kin. 
 Fool hath he ever bin 
 With his ponne [puny] silver pin j 
 Fair without, foul within. 
 She makes his cockscomb thin, 
 And quake in every limb. 
 {Quicksilver's in his head, 
 fiut his wit's dull as lead. 
 Lord, for thy pity ! 
 
 Sir William Knollys, Lord Hunsdon's colleague at Court, was a more 
 considerable person than this. He was not a fool, nor timorous, nor mer- 
 curial. He sat in Parliament, and had weight with the House in matters 
 of supply ; he was an important member of the Privy Council ; and, like 
 Polonius, he was not merely an officer of the Household, but was also in 
 the confidence of the Sovereign for great affairs of State. Amongst the 
 conjectures as to the original of Polonius, there is a half-serious one of 
 Edward FitzGerald (in conversations with James Spedding) that he was 
 Francis Bacon. 
 
 394 
 
JEPHTHAH, JUDGE OF ISRAEL 
 
 The large amount of irony in ' Hamlet ' has been 
 often remarked. The spirit of the play is so entirely 
 and consistently that which the Greek rhetoricians called 
 Eironeia, or dissimulation, that one might suppose 
 Shakespeare to have been reading something upon the 
 uses of that artifice in the classic drama, or to have been 
 discussing it with a learned man — Camden, perhaps, or 
 Ben Jonson. At the same time, it was in the old 
 Gothic legend that he found the idea of Hamlet affect- 
 ing madness with a view to accomplish his revenge, 
 which affectation is the leading irony of the play. I 
 shall have to show later how this principle of irony or 
 dissimulation, which is expounded in the play itself 
 under the name of " indirection," pervades the whole 
 of the plot and much of the dialogue (so that what is 
 said of or to one is sometimes meant for another), and 
 how it has the effect of making the characters of 
 Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes an empirical patchwork, 
 in which no unity or consistency is discoverable. But 
 it will be necessary to anticipate the more general state- 
 ment upon the oblique ironies of the play by those 
 instances of irony which are aimed at Polonius directly. 
 There are three principal ones, each of which is a kind 
 of enigma by itself. 
 
 (i) Jephthah, judge of Israel. — When Polonius 
 enters to announce the arrival of the players, Hamlet 
 addresses him in this unexpected way : 
 
 Ham. O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou ! 
 Pol. What a treasure had he, my lord ? 
 Ham. Why, 
 
 ' One fair daughter, and no more. 
 The which he loved passing well.' 
 
 Pol. \_Jside'\ Still on my daughter. 
 Ham. Am I not i' the right, old Jephthah ? 
 Pol. If you .call me Jephthah, my lord, I have a daughter that 
 I love passing well. 
 
 Ham. Nay, that follows not. 
 
 Pol. What follows, then, my lord ? 
 
 395 
 
HAMLET'S REVENGE 
 
 Ham. Why, 
 
 ' As by lot, God wot,' 
 and then, you know, 
 
 ' It came to pass, as most like it was,' — 
 
 the first row of the pious chanson will show you more ; for look 
 where my abridgement comes. 
 
 The players enter to cut short a quotation which 
 would have been too pointed if it had been finished. 
 On turning to the pious chanson, or " godly ballet " 
 (of the first quarto), we find the rest of the verse 
 to be : 
 
 It came to pass, most like it was 
 That great wars there should be ; 
 And who should be chief but he, but he ? 
 
 The moral of the story of Jephthah, as given else- 
 where by Shakespeare, is : 
 
 To keep that oath were more impiety 
 
 Than Jephthah's when he sacrificed his daughter. 
 
 Hamlet's innuendo is that Polonius sacrificed Ophelia 
 rather than lose his opportunity of being chief in the 
 " great wars " that were to be. This is exactly the 
 situation of Knollys at the time of Mistress Fitton's 
 trouble. She was, if not his daughter, yet his ward, 
 and contracted to him informally. When she most 
 needed his help, he was preoccupied with a matter that 
 had given him much anxiety for more than a year 
 before, the disaffection of his nephew Lord Essex. 
 In the very midst of the political plot the situation of 
 Mistress Fitton became known to Elizabeth, who placed 
 her in durance, and shortly after caused Lord Pembroke 
 to be imprisoned as the supposed cause of her mis- 
 fortune. The two sonnets 124 and 152, taken together, 
 contain, according to my reading of them, Shakespeare's 
 assumption that Knollys was the cause. But if we set 
 them aside, whether on the ground that the identity of 
 Knollys cannot be proved in them, or that Shakespeare 
 
 396 
 
THE THREE CLOUD-SHAPES 
 
 cannot be trusted, we have fourteen letters of Mr. 
 Comptroller to the young lady's married sister, in the 
 earlier of which he shows the ardour of a lover, and in 
 the later takes some blame to himself for her melancholy 
 situation, renewing his offer of marriage as if it were on 
 his conscience to make her reparation. At the critical 
 time there are no letters from him, but only a message, 
 conveyed indirectly to his correspondent, that he desired 
 to hear from her. It is hardly doubtful that he held 
 aloof, " was a marble to her tears, is washed with them, 
 but relents not," like the Lord Angelo in ' Measure for 
 Measure.' The unprinted ballad which narrates the 
 event says that he was " afeared " when " they " ran 
 at the. herd of deer under his charge, " they " meaning 
 probably the Puritans, to which party KnoUys belonged, 
 being the son of a Puritan. His reasons for being 
 afraid might have been private and personal, as well as 
 public and official. If it had been his lot to be sus- 
 pected by the Queen, as Lord Pembroke was, he could 
 hardly have been free to play the part in the great 
 affairs of State which he did play in those very weeks. 
 If he was not literally the " chief" in the " great wars " 
 that should be, he was very prominent, and was 
 honoured by a visit of the Queen to his country 
 house in the autumn following, was specially named 
 by her in the speech from the throne in December, 
 and promoted to be Treasurer of the Household a 
 year after. 
 
 (2) Do you see yonder cloud? — Hamlet's last con- 
 versation with Polonius was near midnight, just before 
 he murdered him. The chamberlain enters to conduct 
 him to the queen's closet, and Hamlet, instead of 
 answering to the business, directs his attention to a 
 cloud in the sky: the scene is still the auditorium of 
 the play, and was doubtless meant to be the open court 
 of the castle of Elsinore, the castle or palace of Kron- 
 borg, in the court of which stage plays were given, 
 according to the account in Braun's Civitates Or bis, 
 
 397 
 
HAMLET'S REVENGE 
 
 Terrarum, which was Shakespeare's source for topo- 
 graphical details^: 
 
 Ham, Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in the shape of a 
 camel ? 
 
 Pol. By the mass, and 'tis like a camel indeed. 
 
 Ham. Now, methinks, it's like a weasel. 
 
 Pol. 'Tis back'd like a weasel. 
 
 Ham. Or like a whale ? 
 
 Pol. Very like a whale ! 
 
 This is madness, if one pleases. But the method of 
 it is, that the changing shapes of the cloud in the 
 midnight sky are the phases of the great paternity 
 question, taken in a certain order. The three cloud- 
 shapes are the three fFills of the Sonnets. Shakespeare 
 himself is the camel, because he is made to bear the 
 burden ; it is the same figure in which Pandarus 
 describes Achilles to Cressida in ' Troilus and Cressida.* 
 Lord Pembroke is the weasel, because he slips through. 
 Knollys is the whale, Polonius assenting heartily to 
 that likeness, so that it is left with him as the con- 
 clusion of the whole matter by his own inadvertent 
 admission — the awkward monster is stranded. All the 
 beasts in the midnight sky are backed, the weasel's case, 
 which is the least obvious, being alone specially brought 
 out. 
 
 At the end of this mysterious dialogue Hamlet says : 
 
 'Tis now the very witching time of night, 
 
 When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out 
 
 Contagion to this world ; now could I drink hot blood. 
 
 And do such bitter business as the day 
 
 Would quake to look on. 
 
 ' Vol. iv. No. 26. " Area tam spaciosa ac lata ... in qua, institutis 
 theatris et scenis, comoediae exhiberi." The suggestion of the fencing- 
 match may have come from the "solemnia hastarum ludicra institui possunt : 
 torneumata vocant, in quibus cataphracti, hastas vibrare, simulate et ludicro 
 conflictu ad exercitia equestria informari sclent." The original suggestion 
 of the fencing-match came from the equestrian feats of the gentleman of 
 Normandy, Lamond, who had been at the castle of Elsinore two months 
 before (IV. vii. 82). The "platform" of the castlq qf.KcQnborg is showa 
 best in another plate, vol. v. No. 33. 
 
 398 
 
GENERATIO EQUIVOCA 
 
 These thoughts have been put into his mind by 
 Polonius, whom his eye follows in his exit ; he is the 
 object of them ; it is the foregoing parable of the 
 cloud that explains the sequence of the thought. And 
 the very next deed is the murder, not of the king 
 (who is let off ostensibly because he is at his prayers) 
 but of Polonius. 
 
 (3) For, if the sun breed maggots, etc. — There was 
 interpolated into the text of the second quarto the 
 following fragment of dialogue between Hamlet 
 and Polonius at their first interview, which is the 
 only real addition made to the part of Polonius in 
 the revision of the play : 
 
 Ham. [Reading from a book'] " For, if the sun breed maggots 
 in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion," — Have you a 
 daughter ? 
 
 Pol. I have, my lord. 
 
 Ham. Let her not walk i' the sun ; conception is a blessing ; 
 but as your daughter may conceive — friend, look to't. 
 
 Pol. [jiside] How say you by that? Still harping on my 
 daughter. 
 
 Polonius is perhaps too bewildered by the abruptness 
 and astounding substance of the innuendo to see the 
 point of it, which is, that he must not be surprised if 
 Ophelia should conceive by spontaneous generation. 
 That is, of course, the only possible meaning of the 
 maggots bred by the sun in a dead dog ; it is the 
 well-known scientific doctrine of generatio equivoca, 
 applied to a case in which the insinuation is that the 
 paternity was equivocal. It is a very pointed form of 
 irony, and shows what a deep person Hamlet was when 
 he most seemed mad. The full meaning of the 
 innuendo will appear when we come to the part of 
 Ophelia. 
 
 In order to carry out his own private purpose 
 under cover of the conventional Revenge of Hamlet, 
 Shakespeare formally adopts and announces a principle 
 of •' indirection," which is an English name for the 
 
 399 
 
HAMLET'S REVENGE 
 
 Eironeia or Irony of the Greeks. It is given to 
 Polonius to expound, as if it were the peculiar wisdom 
 of that self-satisfied politician : 
 
 And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, 
 With windlasses and with assays of bias, 
 By indirections find directions out. 
 
 But it is clear from another passage of the first quarto 
 that Hamlet was the superior of Polonius at his own 
 game. Polonius is made to say : 
 
 By heaven, 'tis as proper for our age to cast 
 Beyond ourselves as 'tis for the younger sort 
 To leave their wantonness. Well,^ 
 I am sorry that I was so rash. 
 
 The whole meaning of Hamlet's treatment of Polonius 
 is, that he takes the measure of him and holds him 
 safe in the matter of policy at every turn.^ Polonius 
 is ironically made the exponent of the principle of 
 " indirection," as if he were a master of the art ; but 
 nearly every one in the piece is infected with " indirec- 
 tion," or caught in the vortices of it ; and Hamlet is 
 the controlling spirit of it all. In sympathy with his 
 own oblique pursuit of Polonius, which is the central 
 indirection, the principle of irony or dissimulation 
 turns up from point to point all through the play (as I 
 shall show in detail), and is very obvious in the various 
 catastrophes — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the bearers 
 of their own death-warrant, Gertrude poisoned by the 
 cup meant for Hamlet, Laertes killed by his own foil ; 
 even Horatio is ironical at the very last, for he promises 
 to vindicate Hamlet, and to clear up the whole im- 
 broglio, in a speech which he is to make after the fall of 
 the curtain. In keeping with the indirection or irony 
 of the action, and (as I shall contend) also of the 
 dialogue in places, Hamlet is made to carry on a 
 philosophic commentary or chorus, whereby everything 
 is shown to be out of joint and perverse in human 
 affairs at large. 
 
 400 
 
SYSTEMATIC IRONY 
 
 Although the principle of indirection is adhered 
 to so closely all through the play that the author 
 may seem to have conceived the complete idea of a 
 Tragedy of Errors, yet it is probable that it began in 
 his mind with the necessity of masking the animus 
 against Polonius. That moment which Goethe imagines, 
 when the spirit of the whole presented itself to the 
 author's mind as a pure gift from above, was when he 
 realised the vivid scene in the old legend of Hamlet 
 where the hidden counsellor is murdered in a bye- 
 stroke of barbaric contempt. He saw that it was the 
 most dramatic moment in the whole story ; and as it 
 was j ust what he wanted for a purpose of revenge all 
 alive and real in his own imagination if not in his 
 moral feelings, he made it the climax of his tragedy. 
 Everything in it leads up to the murder of Polonius, 
 and the spirit of the action stops automatically at that 
 point. AH the critics since Goethe's time have per- 
 ceived that the climax is at the end of the third Act, 
 and that the action drags through the remaining two 
 Acts, needing to be worked up artificially to a new 
 catastrophe by means of the fencing-match. 
 
 The same principle of indirection is the cause of 
 that reluctance on Hamlet's part to avenge his father, 
 which has provided so inexhaustible matter for critics 
 and apologists. Hamlet is made to suggest an irreso- 
 lute mind in soliloquy ; but there is not a trace of 
 irresolution in his actions at large. Except in the 
 executing of vengeance on the king, he is always a 
 prompt and effective person — in encountering the 
 Ghost, in engaging the players and adapting the play, 
 in whipping out his rapier to kill Polonius, in changing 
 the letters carried by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to 
 England, in jumping on board the pirate, in coming 
 forward to meet Laertes at the funeral of Ophelia, and 
 in accepting the challenge to fence with him ; while his 
 demeanour towards Ophelia on the three occasions when 
 he meets her is so brusque or peremptory that he is 
 
 401 2 D 
 
HAMLET'S REVENGE 
 
 accounted mad. So far from being a mooning 
 philosopher, he knows by intuition and acts upon 
 impulse, with a quick wit and a masterful spirit, declaring 
 himself to be " very proud, revengeful [originally 
 " disdainful "], ambitious." 
 
 The best proof that his pursuit of Claudius wa^ a 
 pretence or a cloak for his pursuit of Polonius, is that 
 the author found it impossible to keep up the pretence 
 after Polonius was killed. It appears that he tried to 
 do so, but ultimately thought better of it, and allowed 
 the revenge upon Claudius to fade out of sight. After 
 the murder of Polonius, while Hamlet is still admonish- 
 ing his mother, the Ghost rises to remind him of what 
 he had forgotten : 
 
 Ham. Do you not come your tardy son to chide, 
 That, lapsed in time and passion, lets go by 
 The important acting of your dread command ? 
 O, say ! 
 
 Ghost. Do not forget : this visitation 
 Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose. 
 
 After the murder of Polonius becomes known, every- 
 thing is hurried to get Hamlet shipped off to England ; 
 but he takes the earliest opportunity, when he is on his 
 way to embark, to dismiss Rosencrantz and Guilden- 
 stern for a few minutes, and to deliver himself of the 
 famous soliloquy of the fourth Act (in the second 
 quarto, but omitted in the folio) : 
 
 How all occasions do inform against me. 
 And spur my dull revenge j 
 
 ending with the resolution : 
 
 O, from this time forth. 
 My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth. 
 
 But his thoughts were not bloody ; even the fresh 
 treachery of Claudius against his own life stirs him 
 merely to a deliberative conference with Horatio in the 
 fifth Act : 
 
 402 
 
POLONIUS THE OBJECT 
 
 Is't not perfect conscience 
 To quit him with this arm, and is't not to be damn'd 
 To let this canker of our nature come 
 In further evil ? . . . 
 
 — a passage of twelve lines introduced into the folio text, 
 of course by the author himself, to replace the bloody- 
 thoughts soliloquy which he found it expedient to 
 strike out. This soliloquy contains some of the finest 
 lines in the play, some of those gnomic sayings which 
 have passed into universal currency. Editors have 
 therefore been reluctant to sacrifice the speech, and 
 have invented a theory that its omission from the folio 
 was a blunder of Heminge and Condell, forget- 
 ting that the later conversation with Horatio upon 
 the same subject was inserted in its place as more 
 appropriate to Hamlet's mood and bearing throughout 
 the rest of the play. Thus in the end Shakespeare 
 was honest to his own private purpose by dropping 
 Hamlet's talk of revenge for his father's death in aU 
 his later speeches, having dropped the ironical mad- 
 ness from his demeanour. All the fierce mutterings 
 of bloody, bawdy, lecherous, incestuous, treacherous 
 villain come to an end automatically after the third 
 Act. When Hamlet reappears after his abortive 
 voyage, he enters, says one, like a man who has just 
 come through a sharp illness and is in the placid mood 
 of convalescence : he has forgotten about the Ghost, 
 about Claudius, and (says another of the distinguished 
 Blackwood critics) even about Ophelia. And indeed 
 he had escaped from a frightful tension of the nerves 
 when he delivered himself of that prompt and vigorous 
 sword-thrust through the arras. Only once after that 
 does he relapse for a moment, when he outbids Laertes 
 by ranting in the grave of Ophelia ; and then, he 
 explains, he had forgot himself. 
 
 The action culminates in the murder of Polonius, 
 as the critics cannot fail to see ; and the reason why it 
 culminates there is, that Hamlet has fulfilled his self- 
 
 403 
 
HAMLET'S REVENGE 
 
 appointed task, and does not care to conceal the fact by 
 his bearing throughout the rest of the piece. It would 
 surely not have been impossible to have resumed the 
 main current of the revenge, after the unfortunate 
 contretemps with Polonius, and to have made it to 
 grow in volume and velocity until King Claudius was 
 encountered face to face in a final scene and dispatched 
 in a manner suited to his crime and to the solemnity of 
 the Ghost's behests. But there is no attempt whatever 
 made to follow that purpose. The two last Acts are 
 needed for an altogether different purpose — the elegy 
 of Ophelia ; and the elegy upon Ophelia is absolutely 
 homogeneous with the revenge upon Polonius, 
 Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes play important parts 
 in helping forward the action ; but they are hardly 
 ever suffered to interest us on their own account. 
 There are just three complete and consistent parts in 
 the play — Hamlet, Polonius, and Ophelia ; and the 
 greatest of these is Ophelia. 
 
 The main " indirection," then, of the tragedy was 
 the revenge upon Polonius, all the while that the con- 
 ventional revenge upon Claudius seemed to be in hand. 
 But this oblique or ironical purpose involved many 
 other "windlasses and assays, of bias," so that indirec- 
 tions meet us everywhere. 
 
 Nothing in the whole play shows better the author's 
 ironical and ambiguous method and purpose than the 
 first line which Hamlet speaks : 
 
 A little more than kin and less than kind. 
 
 It is a carefully constructed riddle, which had been 
 thought out in the interval between the first quarto and 
 the second (in which it is interpolated). It is a riddle 
 both in form and in substance, and is the riddle of the 
 play, the answer to which, if we can find it, should 
 explain the mystery. The emphasis falls upon the last 
 word, " kind," which must be the substantive meaning 
 " nature," as it always does in Old English — " a little 
 
 404 
 
THE OPENING ENIGMA 
 
 more than kin and less than nature." Hamlet appears 
 to be commenting in an aside upon the gracious words 
 of Claudius, just spoken : 
 
 But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son, — 
 
 and he is supposed to mean that Claudius, as at once 
 his uncle and his step-father, is somehow more than kin 
 to him and less than kind. As in many other instances 
 of irony in the play, the apparent or surface meaning 
 has a sufficient sense in a vague and not very pointed 
 way, and why seek farther ? The reason for going 
 deeper is that the line is plainly meant to be a riddle, 
 and that Hamlet is giving out the keynote of that 
 cunning or affected madness which he practises through- 
 out until he embarks for England. Let us break up 
 the riddle into its elements. What is more than kin ? 
 What is less than kind (i.e. nature) ? Strictly, there 
 is only one relationship more than kin, and that is the 
 parental and filial : a child is not kin, but, as Prospero 
 says of Miranda, "a thrid of mine own life." The 
 riddle has an important adverb, " a little more than 
 kin," the qualification certainly meaning something 
 ironical. Again, there is strictly only one relationship 
 of the sexes less than kind, or nature, and that is some 
 form or degree of incest. The vaguely sufficient sense 
 is, that Claudius and Gertrude were married, and become 
 " one flesh " as Hamlet says, which is " more than kin " 
 by rite and covenant. Again, the relationship between 
 them (and of Hamlet to Claudius) was "less than 
 nature," because Gertrude had been his brother's wife. 
 The deep and ironical sense looks away from Claudius 
 and Gertrude altogether, and glances obliquely at two 
 persons who are of the company, but not the prominent 
 figures in it, namely, Polonius and Ophelia. Hamlet 
 delivers his riddle upon the cue of " my son " ; so that 
 it is arbitrary, fanciful, or what not, to seek any other 
 context for it. It may be objected further that Hamlet 
 must have had second sight to have divined at that stage 
 
 405 
 
HAMLET'S REVENGE 
 
 what came to his knowledge only in the course of the 
 second Act. But it is to be remarked that the first 
 quarto is consistent in omitting both the opening riddle 
 and the corresponding irony of the sun breeding 
 maggots ; these were both interpolated without strict 
 regard to consistency, as often happens with interpola- 
 tions. The one is a riddle of spontaneous generation ; 
 the other of something equally paradoxical or impossible; 
 and neither, therefore, is capable of being construed in 
 a matter-'of-fact sense. If the riddle had been like that 
 in the opening scene of ' Pericles ' (which is not Shake- 
 speare's own), it would have been a scarcely disguised 
 brutal admission of incest between a father and daughter, 
 with the same pun upon " kind " in the one as upon 
 " kindness " in the other. In ' Hamlet ' the irony is of 
 another quality, and so deep that one feels the hope- 
 lessness of trying to prove that it is there at all : it is 
 impossible to forget the " ninety-and-nine just persons 
 who never saw a joke in their lives." If Polonius had 
 not been the father of Ophelia, there would have been 
 the less need for elusive innuendo. 
 
 Claudius and Gertrude 
 
 The same ruling principle of irony or indirection 
 must be applied to explain several puzzling things in 
 the treatment of Claudius and Gertrude, especially the 
 charge of incest which is brought against both with 
 so much passion. In marrying his brother's widow, 
 Claudius was technically in the same situation as Henry 
 VIII. when he married Catharine of Arragon, the widow 
 of Prince Arthur ; and he may be assumed to have 
 obtained a papal dispensation, just as he must be assumed 
 to have succeeded to the crown after a formal election 
 by the Estates of Denmark. He is denounced by Hamlet 
 as a bawdy, lecherous, incestuous villain ; and again as a 
 cutpurse of the empire and the rule who stole the crown 
 and put it in his pocket. If there were not a certain 
 
 406 
 
CLAUDIUS AND GERTRUDE 
 
 speciousness in these charges, they would not be there : 
 they may fit Claudius in a sense, while Hamlet's mad- 
 ness accounts for the passion with which they are 
 delivered. Again, as regards the queen his mother, 
 whom he handles so roughly in the closet scene, it is 
 to be remarked that, in the first quarto, she was not 
 privy to the poisoning of her former husband, and that 
 she answers her vehement son as if she had nothing in 
 particular on her conscience, concluding at length that 
 he was beside himself. Yet Hamlet's passion was not 
 feigned in its substance : it was only misdirected in its 
 object. 
 
 Hamlet's chief indignation before he met the Ghost 
 was at the haste of the second marriage. That may be 
 admitted to have been a reasonable grievance ; and it is 
 clear from a curious medical error which has crept into 
 the details of the poisoning, that Shakespeare was think- 
 ing of a reprobated historical case — the marriage of 
 Bothwell with the Queen of Scots in May 1567, three 
 months after the murder of Darnley. The effect of 
 the poison is described to have been a sudden loathsome 
 tetter, or eruption, which overspread or barked about 
 all the body like a leprosy. There is no medical 
 authority for such an effect of acute poisoning, or of 
 anything at all like it. It comes obviously from George 
 Buchanan's account of the murder of Darnley, which 
 was published as a pamphlet both in Latin and in 
 French in 1571 and 1572. Darnley was killed by an 
 explosion of gunpowder at Edinburgh. But some two 
 months before that, on leaving Stirling for Glasgow, 
 he was taken on the road with a painful illness, followed 
 by a loathsome eruption. He reached Glasgow, and 
 lay there very ill for several weeks, the Queen visiting 
 him in his sickness. He was then brought to Edin- 
 burgh in a very feeble state, and was shortly after blown 
 up. The eventual crime recalled to his partisans the 
 sudden illness after leaving Stirling ; and Buchanan, 
 who was on the side opposed to the Queen, published 
 
 407 
 
HAMLET'S REVENGE 
 
 the belief that it was due " not to the strength of any 
 disease, but to human fraud," and that the pustules 
 were the " indices " of the crime ; in other words, it 
 was not blood poisoning, but criminal poisoning.^ 
 Bishop Lesley, however, says that it was a certain 
 disease, which is sometimes called blood-poisoning ; 
 and there is every reason to believe that he was cor- 
 rectly informed. That is Shakespeare's only possible 
 source for the sudden appearance of a loathsome erup- 
 tion as the effect of " hebona in a vial " poured into 
 the ears of the sleeping king ; and as he took the toxi- 
 cology from Buchanan, so also he may be assumed to 
 have taken the precedent of Queen Mary's hasty mar- 
 riage with Bothwell. The indecent haste of the mar- 
 riage is the subject of one soliloquy and of a few sarcasms 
 to Horatio ; but as soon as the conferences with the 
 Ghost begin, Hamlet's mind becomes fully possessed 
 by the notion of incest, and his language inflamed to 
 passion-heat. I am bound to confess that I do not see 
 how Claudius deserves it (waiving the point of murder), 
 and I am stiU more at a loss to understand how Ger- 
 trude has merited it except formally. I believe that it 
 was necessary for Hamlet (or rather Shakespeare) to 
 deliver hihiself of such passionate reprobation, that it 
 was impossible for him, owing to various circumstances, 
 to direct it upon two real persons who had incurred it, 
 morally if not technically, and that the principle of 
 
 1 Buchanan's account is as follows, p. 1 3 of De Maria Scotorum Regina, 
 etc., Lond. 1571 (?). The date is December 1566, and the reference is to 
 Darnley : — " Antequam mille passus Sterilino abesset, tam vehementer dolor 
 simul omnes corporis partes afflixit, ut facile appareret non a vi alicujus morbi 
 sed ab humana fraude id profectum. Cujusfraudis indices, liventes pustulae 
 cum Glascuam venisset toto corpore eruperunt tanto cum dolore et omnium 
 partium vexatione ut exigua vitae spe duceret spiritum." The resemblance 
 of the poisoning of King Hamlet to the supposed poisoning of Darnley was 
 first pointed out by the Rev. James Plumptre, of Clare Hall, Cambridge, in 
 the Appendix (p. 32) to his Obser'vations on Hamlet (1796). He seeks to 
 establish a close correspondence between the characters in the play and the 
 real persons in the Scots tragedy, Claudius being Bothwell, Gertrude Queen 
 Mary, the poisoned king Darnley, Hamlet King James, and the murder of 
 Polonius the murder of Rizzio. 
 
 408 
 
CLAUDIUS AND GERTRUDE 
 
 " indirection " explains why Claudius, behind his back, 
 and the unhappy Gertrude, to her face, are made to 
 carry it off. His mother feels it to be so uncalled-for 
 that she concludes Hamlet to be mad ; he works upon 
 her conscience by his mere vehemence (which was real, 
 but had another source altogether), so that she quits 
 his presence as if cowed, and certainly dumbfounded. 
 The astounding epithets applied to Claudius are all 
 used out of his presence, either in soliloquy or in the 
 dialogue with the queen ; so that the effect of them 
 upon him does not come in question. But as he was 
 " frighted with false fire" by the Murder of Gonzago, 
 one could hardly infer the objective existence of his 
 crimes even if he had broken down, as the queen did, 
 under Hamlet's direct dealing with him. Claudius and 
 Gertrude, being guilty of the technical sin of incest, are 
 made to appear tainted with every moral enormity as 
 well. The wrath that is poured out upon them because 
 they had laid themselves open formally ought to have 
 fallen upon others who had laid themselves open morally 
 but not technically. One may perceive the irony of 
 ' Hamlet,' and yet feel the hopelessness of analysing it 
 according to any rule or precedent. It appears to me 
 to be everywhere, even in making Ophelia the daughter 
 of Polonius ; of which relationship I can give no better 
 explanation, in this hypothesis, than that Shakespeare, 
 for his own private amusement, was trying how many 
 pins he could contrive to stick into the waxen image of 
 Sir William Knollys. 
 
 If we leave the question of Claudius' crimes alto- 
 gether, and come to his natural qualities of mind and 
 person, we are still pursued by the same principle of 
 indirection. For some reason, it becomes necessary to 
 glorify his predecessor, to compare him with Hyperion, 
 Jove, Mars, and Mercury, while Claudius, as his foil or 
 contrast, is made a satyr. His deceased brother had all 
 the virtues and all the graces, while he has all the vices 
 and all the deformities. The ascription of all this to 
 
 409 
 
HAMLET'S REVENGE 
 
 Hamlet's father is so arbitrary, and the exaggeration 
 so palpable, that Tieck felt obliged to protest that 
 Claudius was not so black as he was painted, nor was 
 his brother so fair. This treatment of King Claudius 
 reaches a climax in the lines beginning : 
 
 A slave that is not twentieth part the tithe 
 Of your precedent lord ; a vice of kings, etc. 
 
 Shakespeare was careless of his ironical secret when 
 he let Hamlet run on like that. How could Claudius 
 be called a buffoon of kings ? in what sense was he a 
 slave ? why is he so infinitesimal a fraction of his 
 brother ? how, when, and where did he steal the crown 
 from a shelf? did he, in figure or in fact, put the 
 crown in his pocket, did he not wear it on his head ? 
 and, lastly, would any one who has seen him on the 
 stage during the three Acts think of calling him a king 
 Vpf shreds and patches ? And yet Hamlet spoke every 
 one of those sarcasms with a ferocity of scorn and an 
 intensity of conviction which leave no robm to doubt 
 that they were meant for some one, and were believed 
 true of some one. They are among the most biting 
 lines that the author ever penned ; and yet they make 
 nonsense for the king in the play. An explanation 
 may be offered as follows : — Having no serious use for 
 Claudius as the object of Hamlet's revenge, he has to 
 provide him with a part which shall keep the conven- 
 tional lines of the story in appearance, and at the same 
 time be alive with feeling. Under the principle of in- 
 direction, irony, or dissimulation, Claudius is made 
 the object of all those suggestions of incest and lechery 
 which pervade the three first Acts. But this single 
 motive does not suffice ; and for the rest Shakespeare 
 goes outside his scheme of the play altogether, having 
 a certain matter in his mind, pertaining to kings and 
 crowns, which he can introduce conveniently. This is 
 his own personal affair of the Laurel Crown, which was 
 then fresh in his mind, and had been recently intro- 
 
 410 
 
TWO KINGS CONTRASTED 
 
 duced into the part of Orlando in ' As You Like It.' 
 The whole of this matter has been gone into fully in 
 former chapters ; what concerns us here is, that Shake- 
 speare, ever conscious of his own merits, had been 
 " struck to the quick " by the " high wrongs " of his 
 enemies in depriving him of the royal honours of the 
 poet, so that the vacant crown, if not actually given to 
 another, was destined for another. Therefore when 
 Hamlet, in immortal words, bids the queen " look on 
 this picture and on this " : 
 
 See, what a grace was seated on this brow ; 
 Hyperion's curls ; the front of Jove himself ; 
 An eye like Mars, to threaten and command ; 
 A station like the herald Mercury 
 New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill : 
 A combination and a form indeed 
 Where every god did seem to set his seal, 
 To give the world assurance of a man : 
 
 — all this is Shakespeare himself, said of himself by 
 himself : it is as far as he ever went in the way of self- 
 apotheosis. Then comes the contrast : 
 
 This was your husband. Look you now what follows : 
 
 Here is your husband ; like a mildew'd ear, 
 
 Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes ? . . . 
 
 . . . What devil was't 
 That thus hath cozen'd you at hoodman-blind ? 
 
 He is still running on with intense passion about 
 the king who stole the diadem from a shelf and put it 
 in his pocket, the king " of shreds and patches," when 
 the Ghost rises ironically at that cue, to remind his 
 ironical son that all this is beside the question. Hamlet 
 is so well aware that he has been preoccupied with 
 another matter, that he blandly anticipates his father's 
 reproof, and confesses that he is "lapsed in time and 
 passion." The " king of shreds and patches," at whose 
 mention the Ghost finds it desirable to appear, is a 
 characteristic instance of Shakespearian wit ; for it may 
 mean either the shreds and patches which were Lord 
 
 411 
 
HAMLET'S REVENGE 
 
 Southampton's share in ' Romeo and Juliet ' and some 
 other plays ; or the " locks of wool or shreds from the 
 whole piece," which are here retorted upon the author 
 of that figure, Ben Jonson ; or, thirdly, it may mean 
 his own creation of Claudius himself, inasmuch as he is 
 not one uniform and homogeneous character, but any- 
 thing and everything that he found occasion to put 
 upon him. 
 
 Laertes 
 
 The part of Laertes is shreds and patches also. In 
 the first quarto, the name is always spelled Leartes, 
 both in the text and in the stage -directions ; so 
 uniformly that it cannot possibly be a misprint. It is 
 obviously one of Shakespeare's numerous coinages, in 
 the form of an anagram or metathesis. The letters 
 make Hearties without H — " heartless without ache," 
 as the substantive meaning pain was then sounded.^ It 
 was changed to Laertes in the second quarto, under 
 which form we would hardly have looked for an 
 anagram, although it is contained in the letters the same 
 as before. There is some reason to suppose that the 
 author had meant the part originally for Lord Pembroke, 
 in respect of his ungenerous refusal to marry Mistress 
 Fitton. But he had to make Laertes the brother of 
 Ophelia, as he had to make Polonius her father ; and 
 in the result he makes him now one thing, now another, 
 as the action requires, but still with reminiscences of 
 Lord Pembroke in Ophelia's flower-scene and at 
 Ophelia's grave. 
 
 In the first quarto, he desires to return to France 
 because he has a presentiment that he had better be 
 out of the way : 
 
 Something is there whispers in my heart 
 
 Which makes my mind and spirits bend all for France. 
 
 ' As late as Kemble, the pronunciation was " the heartidge and the 
 thousand natural shocks." 
 
 412 
 
LAERTES 
 
 This was left out in the revised text, his father's 
 objections to his journey being withdrawn also, although 
 Polonius adverts to them. After cautioning Ophelia 
 to keep her virtue safe locked up (to which she replies 
 wittily that he himself has the key), he is exhibited as 
 having a good time in the gay city of Paris, as Ophelia 
 half expected that he would. He is out of the way 
 during the most stirring scenes, returning upon the 
 news of his father's death. For some reason not easy 
 to divine, he is made to rant a great deal, and at the 
 same time he is as pliable as wax in the king's hands. 
 He is ready to cut Hamlet's throat in the church, but 
 is easily persuaded by the king to adopt treachery ; 
 and, in the second quarto, he is actually made to 
 propose, of his own motion, that the foil should be 
 poisoned. Yet Hamlet, on seeing him for the first 
 time after his absence, thinks of him as " a very noble 
 youth." He rants in the grave, and draws Hamlet 
 into ranting after him. Before the treacherous fencing- 
 match begins, Hamlet has no difficulty in proving to 
 him, by a sophistical speech, that his father's murder 
 was accidental, so that Laertes reserves the point of 
 honour until he is farther advised. He is not without 
 a scruple of conscience about the poisoned weapon 
 when it comes to using it. His last words are to 
 blame the king for everything, and to "exchange 
 forgiveness " with Hamlet, who was nothing loth, 
 having already addressed him in these words : 
 
 Hear you, sir : 
 What is the reason that you use me thus ? 
 I loved you ever ; but it is no matter ; 
 Let Hercules himself do what he may. 
 The cat will mew and dog will have his day. 
 
 The last line is a lapse into his enigmatic manner, and 
 has a meaning only outside the action of the play. 
 
 The treachery of Laertes in the fencing-match may 
 have been meant for that breach of faith in the matter 
 of the Poet Laureateship of which Shakespeare accuses 
 
 413 
 
HAMLET'S REVENGE 
 
 Lord Herbert in the 87th Sonnet. His plot with the 
 king is not unlike the arrangement between Sir Oliver 
 and the duke's wrestler to destroy Orlando in ' As You 
 Like It,' which is almost certainly an allegory of the same 
 literary conspiracy (Chapter IX.). But granting that 
 these private or personal motives are used as the sources 
 of inspiration from time to time, it follows that they 
 must spoil the consistency or homogeneity of Laertes, 
 just as they do of Claudius. Both parts are best 
 regarded as composite, and as put to various uses, both 
 in helping forward the action and in serving the 
 author's indirect ironical purposes ; so that sometimes 
 they seem to be more of the nature of lay figures than 
 real characters. This becomes especially obvious in 
 the scene where the lunatic Ophelia distributes her 
 flowers. 
 
 Note on the First Quarto of ' Hamlet ' 
 
 It is usual to include the quarto of 'The Merry Wives of 
 Windsor' (l6oz) and the first quarto of 'Hamlet' (1603) as two 
 of the four plays of which " surreptitious " editions were published. 
 In my opinion these were both published by the author himself (the 
 former with much of the Justice Shallow dialogue omitted, for a 
 reason), and afterwards worked over by him. As I assume this for 
 ' Hamlet ' in the text, I ought to give reasons and meet objections. 
 
 (l) The prejudice against the first quarto of 'Hamlet' arises 
 mostly from things on the surface. The versification is jumbled, 
 many iambics are incomplete, the spelling and pointing are careless. 
 But these are partly faults of the composing-desk, not necessarily 
 of the MS. copy ; and it may be admitted that Shakespeare did not 
 ever correct the press with anything like the care of a modern 
 author. It happens that the text of 'Hamlet' in the folio of 1623 
 has much the same superficial look of carelessness as the first quarto ; 
 the second quarto, which had been in existence for nearly twenty 
 years, would have made a more elegant and more correct text if it 
 had been facsimiled, with the few excisions and additions which 
 the author had made upon it subsequently. 
 
 (z) The first quarto contains not only all the action of the 
 tragedy, as we now have it, but also the whole of the enigmatic 
 matter correctly printed, excepting the two or three additions and 
 the slight variations in the order of it, that were introduced into the 
 second quarto. Neither Hamlet's mysterious innuendoes to Polonius 
 and Ophelia, nor Ophelia's riddles in the form of songs and of dis- 
 
 414 
 
THE FIRST QUARTO 
 
 jointed artless talk, are " botched up " at all in the printing, as we 
 know that Ophelia's words were " botched up " by those who heard 
 them. It is hardly possible that this should have been the case, if 
 the original text had been procured " surreptitiously " from short- 
 hand notes or otherwise than from the author's own copy. The 
 text of riddles, snatches of songs, and mad talk must have come 
 direct from the author. 
 
 (3) There is one curious misprint in the first quarto which 
 appears to have been composed from Shakespeare's own hand- 
 writing — " no planet frikes " for " no planet strikes." This is 
 exactly the same misreading, of "f " for "st," which is found in 
 a corrupt line of ' A Lover's Complaint ' (appended to the Sonnets 
 of 1609, and of course composed from the author's MS.). The 
 passage, which is concerned with the idea of virtue being easily 
 defended where it is never assailed, reads thus : 
 
 Playing the place which did no forme receive, 
 Playing patient sports in unconstrained gyves. 
 
 The first " playing " has evidently been " attracted " from the second, 
 and should read "payling," paling or setting a pale round; and 
 " forme " should read " storme " : 
 
 Payling the place which did no storme receive. 
 
 And just as Shakespeare's "st" was apt to be mistaken for "f," so 
 his "f" was apt to be mistaken for "p," as in the corrupt line of 
 the same poem : 
 
 Love's arms are peace 'gainst rule, 'gainst sense, 'gainst shame ; 
 
 where " peace " should be " fence." 
 
 (4) The authentic second quarto was issued by the same pub- 
 lisher as the first, Nicholas Ling ; and it is almost certain that 
 James Roberts was the printer of the first (as he was of the second), 
 because it was he who entered the play for copyright the year 
 before it was printed. Again, the second quarto is recognised on 
 its title-page as the legitimate successor of the first — "newly 
 imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was." 
 
 Against these reasons for authenticity is to be set the curious 
 jumble, in the first quarto, of the soliloquy " To be, or not to be," 
 which has done more to prejudice that copy than it ought. The 
 ideas are the same as in the full text of the second quarto, but there 
 is little attention to rhythm, or even to grammatical construction. 
 No other speech is so "botched up," although some are mere 
 sketches of what they became. 
 
 415 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE PASSIVE OPHELIA 
 
 Ophelia is a creation unlike any other in Shakespeare's 
 gallery of women, and unlike any other stage heroine 
 whomsoever. He had just been accused by Ben Jonson 
 of plagiarism ; and as if to show how little his pilferings 
 could have depended upon any lack of originality, he 
 invents a plot and a heroine who defy all ancient or 
 modern rules and precedents. Ophelia is not a character 
 of whom the critics have made much, nor the actresses. 
 Tieck had never seen an Ophelia who satisfied him ; 
 but he had been told that Miss O'Neill was great in the 
 part. A critic in Blackwood, who is writing of Irving's 
 revival of 'Hamlet' in 1879, sympathises with Miss 
 Ellen Terry in having to interpret the part of the " sub- 
 missive little daughter of Polonius." Mrs. Jameson 
 remarks that " she says very little, and what little she 
 does say seems rather intended to hide than reveal the 
 emotions of her heart " ; and then proceeds to discover 
 in her an ideal Ophelia with virtues after her own heart. 
 Goethe confesses that " there is not much to say ; for 
 a few master-strokes complete her character." The 
 anonymous Blackwood critic of 18 18 and 1833, who 
 is believed to have been Thomas Campbell, is also 
 impressed by her submissiveness, passiveness, and long- 
 suffering, and her neglect by every one at the time 
 when she was found making her way to the presence 
 at Elsinore in her lunacy : even Hamlet is said, by one 
 
 416 
 
THE TIME-SCHEME OF 'HAMLET' 
 
 critic, to have forgotten her very existence until he finds 
 himself accidentally present at her funeral. 
 
 Yet Ophelia is the central figure of the tragedy. It 
 is round her that all the action moves. It is to her 
 that everything is subordinated. It is on account of 
 her that the author has calculated and contrived his 
 plot with minute watchfulness at every point. This is 
 seen most strikingly in the time-scheme of the play, 
 which has been the subject of so much criticism. No 
 fewer than four embassies or expeditions are required ; 
 they go out for some object which is not apparent (and 
 has even been pronounced non-existent), and the action 
 has to wait their return. In the first Act, Laertes is sent 
 to Paris, and the ambassadors are sent to Norway. When 
 the second Act begins, there has been a long enough 
 interval for Laertes to need money and letters from his 
 father, and for the ambassadors to have returned from 
 Norway. There has also been time to send to Wittenberg 
 for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The action then 
 proceeds from day to day until the murder of Polonius. 
 After that crisis in the tragedy, there follow more ex- 
 peditions, which take time. Hamlet is shipped off to 
 England, encounters pirates two days out, escapes on 
 board the pirate, and after cruising about in her for an 
 uncertain time, is landed on some part of the coast of 
 Denmark, whence he sends sailors with letters ; Horatio 
 comes to him, and the two together arrive at Elsinore 
 in time to witness Ophelia's funeral. We are enabled 
 to measure the length of Hamlet's detention by the 
 pirates by means of another expedition, which coincides 
 with his almost exactly, and cannot be shortened to 
 suit any theory. Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, is 
 met by Hamlet on Danish ground as he is on his 
 way to embark for England ; the Norwegians are on 
 their way to Poland to assert a claim to territory ; they 
 are to get leave to march across Danish territory, they 
 must again take shipping to some Baltic port, make 
 for a part of Poland, finish their campaign, and arrive 
 
 417 3 E 
 
THE PASSIVE OPHELIA 
 
 at the Sound on their return to Norway only a day or 
 two, or a few days at most, after Hamlet's reappearance, 
 so that Fortinbras comes in just as the fencing-match 
 ends. The interval between the murder of Polonius 
 and the fresh sequence of events in the last days, which 
 occurs in the play between the fourth and the fifth scene 
 of Act IV., is marked by two other journeys. Laertes 
 is brought back from France. The ship carrying 
 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to England had arrived 
 there, those two had been put to death, and ambas- 
 sadors from the English king have reached Elsinore 
 with the news : it looks indeed as if Hamlet had 
 inserted their names in the letter instead of his own, 
 in order that news of the executed commission might 
 be sent back. 
 
 The pains taken to impress those two long intervals, 
 which together should cover a space of not less than 
 seven months, are remarkable. It is not one hint that 
 we get, but several on each occasion ; it is not merely 
 by hints that we are led to mark the lapse of time, but 
 by formal journeys, embassies, and military expeditions, 
 the wheels of which go slowly. The action begins 
 when the glow-worm is seen, not later than July, and 
 ends about April following, when the spring flowers 
 are out and the willow is in leaf. 
 
 The need for those two long intervals in the action 
 has been so little apparent to the critics, that the author 
 has been blamed for introducing so many expeditions, 
 and suggestions have been made to carry through the 
 plot without them. Goethe's scheme for the recon- 
 struction of the plot of * Hamlet,' propounded in the 
 fifth Book (chap, iv.) of Wilhelm Meister (which 
 was actually carried out for the German stage by 
 Klingemann in 1815), was based upon the assumption 
 that the several journeys and embassies "injure the 
 unity of the piece and are entirely out of place " ; he 
 would therefore cut them all out, and substitute one 
 expedition of the Danish fleet to Norway, which should 
 
 418 
 
THE TIME-SCHEME OF 'HAMLET' 
 
 take some time to prepare and be joined by Hamlet, 
 after he learns of his father's murder from the Ghost, 
 so as to secure the allegiance of the army ; the winds 
 are contrary after sailing, and Hamlet returns. Benedix, 
 in a work with a title, Die Shakespearomanie (1873), 
 which shows his point of view, finds the delays in the 
 action to be faults of workmanship, and the real cause 
 of Hamlet's shilly-shallying ; he can discover no reason 
 why the five Acts should not proceed straight on until 
 the revenge is accomplished. There is no change of 
 scene, as in ' Othello ' from Venice to Cyprus, or as 
 in ' Macbeth ' from Inverness and Forres to Dunsinane; 
 but a very easy observance of the unity of place. Why, 
 then, so remarkable a departure from the unity of time .? 
 This is the fundamental question of the plot, the answer 
 to which, if we can find it, will help us to the author's 
 deliberate purpose. It will appear that the two delays 
 in the action are on Ophelia's account. 
 
 On the surface it is not apparent why she should 
 cause delay at either point. The less difficult of the 
 two instances is to bring about the loss of her reason 
 after her father's death ; but the assumed blow might 
 just as well have been immediate in its eiFect. In the 
 earlier interval, Hamlet is supposed by Polonius to have 
 gone mad by degrees for love of her, his lunacy pro- 
 ceeding from a sadness upon being denied access to 
 her, and culminating after a sufficient interval in the 
 madness in which he now raves. That development 
 required time, according to the learned exposition 
 which Polonius gave of its "declension," or its suc- 
 cessive phases. But Polonius is made to put us upon 
 a wrong scent ; and in like manner Claudius is made 
 to put us upon a wrong scent by implying that Ophelia 
 went mad on account of her father's death, a view 
 which Laertes appears to share. The death of Polonius 
 was shrouded in hugger-mugger. Not half-a-dozen 
 persons knew the circumstances of it, and Ophelia was 
 not one of them, according to her own words : " They 
 
 419 
 
THE PASSIVE OPHELIA 
 
 say he made a good end." The horror of the crime 
 might conceivably have unhinged her mind, although 
 that has been thought improbable ; but at all events 
 the particular manner of his death had been kept from 
 her. No one knows where she was from the end of 
 the play-scene until she reappears with a crowd round 
 her in her lunacy ; she is lost to view for several months. 
 Her loss of reason must be medically correct, or not 
 an arbitrary invention ; but the poetic meaning of it 
 is, that she is an " afflicted fancy," such as the author 
 described afterwards in the opening of ' A Lover's 
 Complaint.' She seems to have wandered to the palace 
 alone, and to have been announced to the queen by " a 
 gentleman " in the second quarto, and by Horatio in 
 the folio or final text ; but neither Horatio nor the 
 gentleman knows more than he has gleaned from the 
 crowd at the gate. She has never any woman friend 
 or attendant, as Shakespeare's heroines usually have to 
 give their confidences to ; and now there is no one to 
 explain anything. She is made consistently secretive 
 and demure in the earlier Acts ; so much so that in the 
 narrated scene where Hamlet breaks in upon her sewing 
 in her closet, she is as imperturbable as the Sphinx : in 
 the first quarto he actually feels her pulse to discover 
 whether she is agitated or not. She had a perfect 
 recollection of Hamlet's own agitation, and was able to 
 relate it to her father with a minuteness which speaks 
 volumes for her presence of mind. Here we have one 
 of Shakespeare's master-strokes, correct in art, true 
 to nature : she shows the self-control of women in a 
 marvellous degree, and then her mind snaps with the 
 strain, so that she loses her reason. 
 
 But what occasion had she to outface circumstance, 
 to wear a bold front, to be impenetrable ? Her secret 
 is revealed by degrees, and in four difi^srent ways : first 
 by the Ghost to Hamlet in an unrecorded interview ; 
 secondly, by Hamlet in three separate innuendoes aimed 
 at herself during the play-scene ; thirdly, by her mad 
 
 420 
 
OPHELIA'S SECRET 
 
 songs, artless talk, and language of flowers ; and lastly, 
 by the churlish priest at her funeral. Avert our eyes 
 as we may, and as all the commentators have done, 
 there is no doubt about the fact : Ophelia had a mishap, 
 she bore a child, and Hamlet was not the father of it. 
 All those embassies and expeditions, for whose return 
 the action must tarry, are needed because Ophelia must 
 await nature's law. The Ghost knows what is impend- 
 ing sooner than any one ; by the time of the play-scene, 
 the pregnancy is sufficiently advanced ; then there is a 
 considerable interval, in which the child comes to the 
 birth, dies, and is buried; and thereafter everything 
 proceeds to a rapid conclusion. Ophelia's baby was 
 like Mistress Fitton's in respect that it caused a great 
 deal of trouble, influencing the lives of many, although 
 it lived only a very short time. 
 
 The aversion from any such reading of the part of 
 Ophelia is nothing less than a phenomenon of the mind. 
 Tieck could not help concluding that Ophelia had been 
 unchaste (with Hamlet, he supposed), and was bold 
 enough to say so ; whereupon an Englishman challenged 
 him to a duel ! * Tieck's theory of her guilty relations 
 with Hamlet was held also by Ludwig BOrne. It is 
 clear that Heine had formed a definite image of her in 
 his mind, but he is more ironical than usual in convey- 
 ing it to the reader. Goethe held that she was only 
 subjectively unchaste ; tones of desire were ringing 
 secretly through her soul, and hovering on her lips, 
 which found expression in her lunacy. Subjective 
 unchastity is an unpleasant theme, which may be left 
 to Philina in Wilhelm Meister. One would not have 
 been sorry if Ophelia's English champion had challenged 
 the author of that aspersion ; for it is not at all credit- 
 able to Shakespeare as put upon Ophelia. Moreover, 
 when Goethe plunged his own heroine, Gretchen, into 
 
 ' I give this interesting piece of information on the authority of an 
 essay by Dr. Hirschfeld, of Danzig : " Ophelia, ein poetisches Lebensbild von 
 Shakespeare, zum ersten Male im Lichte arztlicher Wissenschaft," etc., 1 8 8 1 . 
 
 421 
 
THE PASSIVE OPHELIA 
 
 misfortune, he took good care that her unchastity should 
 be both objective and effective. The one condition 
 upon which maiden unchastity may be brought upon 
 the tragic stage is that it shall have its due fruit in the 
 course of nature ; the situation of the woman becomes 
 at once pathetic ; she is removed from the penumbra 
 of indelicacy into the full light of tragedy. Shakespeare 
 manages the business with the subtlety which was 
 peculiar to him among the playwrights of his time ; 
 it affords him scope for his deepest wit, his most 
 dexterous artifices, his most carefully calculated words 
 and phrases, and his most tender feeling towards the 
 weaker sex, according to his rule, Maxima debetur 
 reverentia. puellis. 
 
 I come now to the proofs, which must be minute 
 and systematic according to the importance of the issue. 
 
 (i) Hamlets information touching Ophelia received 
 from the Ghost. — The Ghost had shown himself on three 
 nights before Hamlet encountered him ; he was to be 
 met with upon the terrace of the castle perhaps on any 
 night in that season ; and we know, as matter of fact, 
 that he reappeared to Hamlet at the interview with 
 his mother, some two months or longer after his first 
 appearance to him. On the first occasion he began 
 with a remarkable exordium, which cannot be read 
 too closely : 
 
 I am thy father's spirit ; 
 Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, 
 And for the day confined to fast in fires. 
 Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature 
 Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid 
 To tell the secrets of my prison-house, 
 I could a tale unfold whose lightest word 
 Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood. 
 Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres. 
 Thy knotted and combined locks to part 
 And each particular hair to stand on end. 
 Like quills upon the fretful porpentine : 
 But this eternal blazon must not be 
 To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list, etc. 
 422 
 
THE GHOST'S TALE 
 
 He could unfold a certain tale of horror, were it not 
 that he was forbid to tell secrets out of doors. This is 
 commonly taken to mean a revelation of the pains of 
 purgatory. There does not appear to be any reason 
 for calling that a forbidden secret which had been 
 a common object of the religious imagination for a 
 thousand years, unless the prohibition point ped- 
 antically to the Anglican article which condemned 
 the doctrine of purgatory. (Macaulay remarks that 
 Shakespeare defied the article by merely placing the 
 Ghost in purgatory.) Moreover, the words, " I could 
 a tale unfold," mean a tale to be unfolded, and not 
 a description in the manner of Dante, Some colour 
 is given, however, to the notion of a general apocalypse 
 of the nether world by the last line, " But this eternal 
 blazon must not be to ears of flesh and blood." The 
 word " eternal " was introduced into the second quarto, 
 and would have been " infernal " but for the prohibi- 
 tion against profane words, the original phrase having 
 been " this same blazon," which pointed so plainly to 
 the particular tale in question that it was thought 
 better to change it. Again, it is made to appear that 
 something special, or of a diiFerent kind, was meant in 
 the opening lines of the speech, by the fact that the 
 Ghost proceeds at once to unfold another tale of horror 
 concerning which he does not appear to have been 
 under any restriction, namely, the secret history of his 
 own murder and of his queen's infidelity. One cannot 
 say that the nature of the forbidden tale of horror is 
 left free from ambiguity i although it is caUed a tale 
 to be unfolded, yet it is not on the same footing as the 
 tale which he proceeds forthwith to unfold. But it is 
 probable that nothing more than an ambiguous im- 
 pression is intended. A tale is a tale, a secret is a 
 secret, the horrifying effects of a tale are not the 
 effects of a homily or description, however graphic and 
 impressive. The effects promised from the tale, if it 
 were told, should fix the attention, for two reasons : 
 
 423 
 
THE PASSIVE OPHELIA 
 
 they remind one firstly of the 119th Sonnet, and 
 secondly of the effects which were actually found upon 
 Hamlet on a later occasion when he burst into Ophelia's 
 closet. In the sonnet, Shakespeare was told something 
 by the siren amidst her tears, which made his eyes 
 roll out of their spheres, as in a fit ; which is the same 
 as "make thy two eyes like stars start from their 
 spheres." In the scene with Ophelia sewing in her 
 closet, Hamlet came before her presenting the following 
 strange appearance : 
 
 Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced ; 
 
 No hat upon his head ; his stockings foul'd, 
 
 Ungarter'd, and down-gyved to his ancle ; 
 
 Pale as his shirt ; his knees knocking each other, 
 
 And with a look so piteous in purport 
 
 As if he had been loosed out of hell 
 
 To speak of horrors, he comes before me. 
 
 The first quarto added a significant hint, which was 
 omitted in the revision, namely, that his silence during 
 the interview was like the silence of midnight : 
 
 and parts away, 
 Silent as in the midtime of the night. 
 
 This, taken with the hint which is retained, " as if 
 he had been loosed out of hell to speak of horrors," 
 points to another interview with the Ghost. Ophelia 
 would not have been sewing in her closet at any time 
 between midnight and cock-crow, but she might well 
 have been so occupied in the morning. The disorder 
 of Hamlet's attire means that he had fallen down in 
 a fit, that his convulsion had broken the points of his 
 doublet and hose, that he had lain for a considerable 
 time in a stupor, had perhaps fallen into a sleep of 
 exhaustion, and on coming to himself in the morning 
 had gone as he was, without even picking up his hat, 
 straight to Ophelia's closet, his face pale as his shirt, 
 his knees knocking together : 
 
 424 
 
HAMLET'S FIT 
 
 He took me by the wrist and held me hard ; 
 
 Then goes he to the length of all his arm ; 
 
 And with his other hand thus o'er his brow. 
 
 He falls to such perusal of my face 
 
 As he would draw it. Long stay'd he so ; 
 
 At last, a little shaking of mine arm, 
 
 And thrice his head thus waving up and down, 
 
 He raised a sigh so piteous and profound 
 
 As it did seem to shatter all his bulk 
 
 And end his being : that done, he lets me go : 
 
 And with his head over his shoulder turn'd. 
 
 He seem'd to find his way without his eyes ; 
 
 For out o' doors he went without their help. 
 
 And to the last bended their light on me. 
 
 Ophelia was equal to the occasion ; she never winced ; 
 she was so impassive that Hamlet gives her arm an 
 impatient shake, as one does who is baffled. Neither 
 of them spoke a word. It was only when he had gone 
 that she gave way, and went to seek her father : 
 
 Pol. How now, Ophelia, what's the matter ? 
 
 Ofh. O, my lord, my lord, I have been so affrighted ! 
 
 Pol. With what, i' the name of God ? 
 
 Hamlet's fit, which broke his points and threw his 
 clothes into disorder, is exactly the same effect that was 
 produced upon Othello when he got proof positive (as 
 he believed) of Desdemona's unchastity. That was un- 
 doubtedly an epileptic seizure, although lago softens the 
 term to " ecstasy " in speaking of it to Othello himself : 
 it was a dreadful convulsion of his whole frame, followed 
 by stupor of indefinite duration. lago supposed that he 
 had worked Othello's feelings up to the breaking-point. 
 What Othello was led to believe by the fraud of lago, 
 Hamlet learned on the excellent authority of the Ghost : 
 for some reason his father's spirit was now at liberty to 
 tell the other secret, perhaps because it was nearer to its 
 natural disclosure ; and, as Hamlet was in the habit of 
 walking for hours together in the corridor, it had been 
 easy to find an opportunity. But this was not until 
 some two months after the first revelation, not until 
 the eve of the arrival of the strolling players. 
 
 425 
 
THE PASSIVE OPHELIA 
 
 (2) Hamlefs innuendoes to Ophelia in the play-scene. 
 — The play chosen by Hamlet, 'The Murder of 
 Gonzago,' was intended to catch the conscience of the 
 king, to test the truth of the Ghost's story of foul play. 
 But it was prefaced by an old-fashioned dumb-show 
 of puppets, and by a brief prologue, each of which is 
 made the occasion of a few words between Hamlet 
 and Ophelia, being introduced with no other apparent 
 object than to be the pegs on which to hang those 
 singular remarks. Hamlet's first talk with Ophelia, 
 as they take their places in the circle, is frankly brutal, 
 and may be left to explain itself. The dumb-show then 
 proceeds. 
 
 OpL Belike this show imports the argument of the play. 
 Enter Prologue. 
 
 Ham. We shall know by this fellow : the players cannot keep 
 counsel ; they'll tell all. 
 
 Oph. Will he tell us what this show means ? 
 
 Ham. Ay, or any show that you'll show him ; be not you 
 ashamed to show, he'll not shame to tell you what it means. 
 
 Oph. You are naught, you are naught : I'll mark the play. 
 
 This is as it stands in the second quarto, in which 
 the intention is brought out more clearly by substituting 
 " ashamed " for " afeard," and by making Ophelia show 
 her confusion in exclaiming " You are naught, you are 
 naught." She has fallen into the trap of the dumb-show 
 by asking what it meant, forgetting that she was herself 
 a dumb show, and at th^t very moment trying to 
 conceal her condition by keeping her arms folded across 
 her lap (Hamlet could not have laid his head upon 
 her lap, as he proposed, so long as she was in that 
 guarded attitude). Having found an opening for his 
 innuendo, he presses it home, bidding her not to be 
 ashamed to show ; the players cannot keep counsel, 
 they'll tell all ; this fellow will tell you the meaning of 
 any show that you'll show him. Ophelia is covered 
 with sudden confusion, and turns away from him 
 
 426 
 
INNUENDOES AT THE PLAY-SCENE 
 
 exclaiming " You are naught, you are naught." The 
 dumb-show having served its purpose, to catch the 
 conscience of Ophelia, the play itself comes on, to serve 
 the other purpose of covering the king with confusion,^ 
 although, strangely enough, Hamlet's exclamation after 
 it is, " Frighted with false fire ! " Before the play is 
 ended, Hamlet takes another opportunity of rallying 
 Ophelia. This time she is prepared for him, answer- 
 ing him in the same spirit of irony in which she is 
 addressed : 
 
 Enter Lucianus. 
 
 Ham. This is one Lucianus, nephew to the king. 
 
 Oph. You are as good as a chorus, my lord. 
 
 Ham. I could interpret between you and your love, if I could 
 see the puppets dallying. 
 
 Oph. You are keen, my lord, you are keen. 
 
 Ham. It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge. 
 
 Oph. Still better, and worse. 
 
 Ham. So you mistake [must take] husbands. 
 
 The conversation is substantially the same in the 
 first quarto ; but Hamlet's first answer in it is : "I 
 could interpret the love you hear if I saw the poopies 
 dallying " ; and his reply to the " better and worse " of 
 Ophelia is : " So you must take your husband," which 
 brings out clearly the allusion to the marriage service, 
 and at the same time preserves the innuendo if the 
 words " must take " be pronounced so as to resemble 
 "mistake." Nares has pointed out that "the puppets 
 dallying " is " synonymous with the babies in the eye." ^ 
 
 1 There is a dumb-show of puppets prefixed to the old plays Gorboduc 
 and Jocasta ; but, as Hunter has pointed out, it is not an anticipation of 
 the play itself. He has found, however, a very curious Danish parallel. In 
 1688, six thousand Danish troops landed at Hull ; among other amuse- 
 ments, they performed a morality or miracle play (Herod, etc.), in a prelude 
 to which " all the postures were shown first." Halliwell-PhUlipps was of 
 opinion that the king and queen could have paid no attention to the 
 dumb-show, or they would have seen the plot sooner than they did. It 
 was introduced really for Ophelia's benefit, Hamlet acting as interpreter 
 to her specially. 
 
 2 Francis Beaumont's Salmacis and HermapAroditus,yfhich-was published 
 anonymously in jftoa, and gave Shakespeare two or three ideas for ' Troilus 
 and Cressida,' contains the notion of images reflected in the eye, and the 
 
 427 
 
THE PASSIVE OPHELIA 
 
 Cognate with this is " the love you bear," which is the 
 same phrase as in the 1 52nd Sonnet, and means " the child 
 you bear." Cognate with it, also, is Hamlet's answer, 
 " It would cost you a groaning " to take off the edge of 
 his jest ; that is to say, " It will remain with you until 
 you are delivered." Ophelia's answer, " Still better, and 
 worse," is explained by Steevens : " Better in regard to 
 the wit of your double entendre, but worse in respect to 
 the grossness of your meaning " ; or, with reference to 
 " mistake husbands," it may mean " better for you, and 
 worse for you," which is also the idea of the 119th 
 Sonnet : 
 
 What potions have I drunk of Siren tears 
 Distill'd from limbecks foul as hell within ; 
 Applying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears, 
 Still losing when I saw myself to win ! 
 
 The last words that Hamlet ever speaks to Ophelia 
 are, " So you must take [pronounced " mistake "] 
 your husband " ; and it is as possessed by that same 
 notion of conjugal ambiguity in her thoughts that 
 Ophelia reappears next, after a long interval, in which 
 much has happened.^ 
 
 word "dally" in the same context. Hermaphroditus says to the naiad 
 
 Salmacis : 
 
 " How should I love thee when I do espy 
 
 A far more beauteous nymph hid in thy eye ? '* 
 
 By this the nymph perceived he did espy 
 None but himself reHected in her eye. 
 
 Thus did she dally long, till at the last 
 
 In her white palm she loclc'd his white hand fast. 
 
 ' The behaviour of Hamlet to Ophelia on the three occasions when he 
 meets her (two acted, one narrated) is accounted for in various ways. 
 Shakespeare himself is blamed by Steevens for obscenity and grossness in the 
 play-scene, just as he is blamed for more cryptic forms of the same in the 
 Sonnets. Most critics, however, admit that the author had a legitimate 
 artistic purpose, which was to create the illusion of Hamlet's madness, or to 
 exhibit him as actually mad. This hypothesis is extended by implicatioin 
 to the scene narrated by Ophelia, where the disorder of his dress occurs : it 
 is the disordered dress of a lunatic. It does not appear to have occurred to 
 them that Hamlet is always perfectly well dressed when he is seen on the 
 stage ; that his disarray occurs only once, when it is narrated, not acted 
 {in order that he need not change his dress). One critic who has tried 
 
 428 
 
INTENTION OF THE SONGS 
 
 (3) The intention of Ophelias mad songs. — In the 
 interval her child is born, dies, and is buried. Her 
 father also has met his death. She loses her reason, and 
 in her gentle lunacy she mixes up the two deaths, 
 speaking as if of Polonius when she is thinking of her 
 infant, or passing from the one to the other by those 
 rapid and inconsequent transitions of thought which are 
 peculiar to the insane. By that artifice, true to nature 
 as well as suited to its purpose, the author is enabled 
 to treat a delicate matter with ironical " indirection," 
 
 Re-enter Horatio with Ophelia, 
 
 Oph. Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark ? 
 Queen, How now, Ophelia ? 
 Oph. [Singil How should I your true love know 
 From another one ? 
 By his cockle hat and staff 
 And his sandal shoon. 
 Queen. Alas, sweet lady, what imports this song ? 
 Oph. Say you ? nay, pray you, mark : 
 
 [Sings] He is dead and gone, lady. 
 He is dead and gone : 
 At his head a grass-green turf, 
 At his heels a stone. 
 Queen. Nay, but Ophelia, — 
 0th. Pray you, mark. 
 
 Enter King. 
 
 Queen. Alas, look here, my lord. 
 
 Oph. [Sings] White his shroud as the mountain snow. 
 
 Larded with sweet flowers ; 
 Which bewept to the grave did not go 
 
 With true-love showers. 
 
 to account for Hamlet's behaviour to Ophelia on the hypothesis of sanity 
 is L. Feist, Ueber das Verhaltniss Hamlets und Ophelias: eine dsthetische 
 Untersuchung, zte Auflage, Bingen-am-Rhein, 1877, pp. 22. Basing upon 
 an idea of BOrne's, he maintains that Hamlet's love for Ophelia included a 
 craving for her sympathy in his onerous duties, and that he received a painful 
 shock by the return of his letters and denial of access to her : he found her 
 frivolous when he looked for her support and needed it most. It was a 
 sudden new light to him, whereupon he burst into her closet in a state 
 of agitation, and thereafter treated her with irony and roughness, which 
 were meant to reflect upon himself as well as apply to her. Put yourself in 
 his place as a disillusioned lover, says Feist, and you will understand his 
 conduct in the three successive scenes. 
 
 429 
 
THE PASSIVE OPHELIA 
 
 King. How do you, pretty lady ? 
 
 Oph. Well : God 'ild you ! They say the owl was a baker's 
 daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we 
 maybe. God be at .your table ! 
 King. Conceit upon her father. 
 
 Oph. Pray you, let's have no words of this ; but when they ask 
 you what it means, say you this : 
 
 [Sings] To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day, 
 All in the morning betime, 
 And I a maid at your window 
 To be your Valentine, etc. 
 
 King. How long hath she been thus ? 
 
 Oph. I hope all will be well. We must be patient : but I 
 cannot choose but weep to think they should lay him i' the cold 
 ground. My brother shall know of it : and so I thank you for 
 your good counsel. Come, my coach ! Good night, ladies ; good 
 night, sweet ladies ; good night, good night. [Exit. 
 
 King. Follow her close : give good watch I pray you. 
 
 [Exit Horatio. 
 O, this is the poison of deep grief: it springs 
 All from her father's death. 
 
 The first quarto gives the opening of the song : 
 
 How should I your true love know 
 From another man? 
 
 — thus marking the sex of " true love;" and takes the 
 verse " White his shroud," etc., second in order. 
 Warburton observes that palmers, or pilgrims, were apt 
 to be involved in love afi^airs, and in that way he would 
 explain the drift of Ophelia's gentle raving. Here again, 
 if there be no method in the madness, anything will 
 do. But stage madness is irony, Eironeia, indirection, 
 with which object Ophelia is made to lose her reason, 
 consistently with medical probability. Further, a cockle 
 hat is not a palmer's bonnet with a scallop shell fastened 
 as a badge in front of it ; it is a hat shaped like a 
 cockle, by which term Shakespeare means elsewhere to 
 include the snail. Hats not unlike cockle shells, that is 
 to say, with a rounded crown, not central as in a 
 " bowler " hat, but thrown well back like the boss of a 
 cockle or the " house " of a snail, and with a peak or 
 
 430 
 
INTENTION OF THE SONGS 
 
 brim like the edge of the shell, are found in the portraits 
 of Elizabethan courtiers ; for example, Fulke Greville, 
 as taken in his youth, is pictured in the third volume 
 of Lodge's Portraits wearing a cockle hat. A stafF in 
 the hand is also ambiguous, as it might be either a 
 palmer's staff or the white staff of an officer of the 
 royal household. The illusion of the palmer is aided 
 by the sandal shoon. How is Ophelia to know "your 
 true love" from another man? By certain marks, 
 which are curiously like those of any palmer, but may 
 have a more particular reference, peradventure it be not 
 made too pointed. " Your true love " is addressed to 
 a third party, neither Ophelia nor the supposed palmer : 
 it is the child, and the child's true love (ironical) is its 
 father. How is she to know her child's father from 
 another man ? By his cockle hat and his staff, and his 
 sandal shoon. This is the idea of " mistake husbands," 
 which Hamlet left planted in the mind of Ophelia the 
 last time she was seen before her lunacy : she resumes 
 exactly where she left off. Her perplexity is exactly 
 the same as that of Mistress Fitton : the impossibility of 
 finding a father for her child and a "justification " for 
 herself.^ 
 
 After the verse upon the ambiguous paternity, the 
 song proceeds to the fate of the infant : its shroud was 
 white as the mountain snow, larded with sweet flowers ; 
 it was carried to the grave unwept, unattended by the 
 "showers" of "true love," its father. In all the 
 quartos, and in aU the folios, the words are — 
 
 Which bewept to the grave did not go 
 With true-love showers. 
 
 But Pope declared that the negative made nonsense, 
 and struck it out — with the approval of every subsequent 
 
 1 R. G. Latham, M.D., Tiuo Dissertations on the Hamlet of Saxo- 
 Grammaticus and of Shakespeare, London, 1872, remarks at p. 14.6 that 
 " Ophelia's madness consists chiefly in the mistake of one man for another " ; 
 and compares it with the case of the gaoler's daughter in The Tivo Noble 
 Kinsmen, 
 
 431 
 
THE PASSIVE OPHELIA 
 
 editor ! How would Pope have liked to have his own 
 negatives struck out ? The " not " really belongs to 
 *' bewept," its displacement being excusable in Ophelia's 
 random thoughts. The meaning of the original text is 
 exactly that of the 124th Sonnet, on the desertion of 
 the unfathered " child of State," which is also unwept 
 by ungrammatical "showers." The inconsistency of 
 " unbewept " with one of Ophelia's songs in her next 
 scene, is only on the surface : 
 
 They bore him barefaced on the bier ; 
 Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny : 
 And in his grave rain'd many a tear : — 
 Fare you well, my dove ! 
 
 This was introduced into the second quarto ; but 
 the past tense, " rain'd many a tear " in his grave, 
 was seen to be misleading, and in the folio text (which 
 also introduces the "Hey nonny " line) the last line was 
 altered thus : 
 
 And on his grave mines many a teare ; 
 
 that is to say, the rain which raineth every day and any 
 day was all the tears that were shed upon the grave. 
 Moreover, the past or imperfect tense, " rained many a 
 tear," was equally untrue of the burial of Polonius, 
 which was "in hugger-mugger." Laertes, on hearing 
 the lines sung, appears to take the reference as to their 
 father : 
 
 Hadst thou thy wits, and didst persuade revenge. 
 
 It could not move thus. 
 
 But Ophelia had ended with another object in her 
 vacant gaze, to which she throws a kiss or caress : 
 " Fare you well, my dove ! " There are two other 
 notable instances of the same rapid change of thought, 
 both of them in her second scene : 
 
 His beard was as white as snow, 
 All flaxen was his poll : 
 
 He is gone, he is gone, 
 
 And we cast away moan : 
 God ha' mercy on his soul ! 
 
 432 
 
HER ARTLESS TALK 
 
 A white beard and a flaxen poll are at the opposite 
 extremes of age : the one is her father, the other her 
 infant.-' 
 
 The other confusion of thought between her father 
 and her infant is in the flower-language : 
 
 I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my 
 father died ; they say he made a good end, — 
 
 [Sings'] For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy. 
 
 The meaning, in the language of floral emblems, of 
 violets withering will be referred to in the next 
 section but one. 
 
 (4) The intention of Ophelia's artless talk. — Of the 
 two recondite sayings or riddles of the mad Ophelia, 
 one was transferred in the second quarto to a new 
 context, but is otherwise the same in both editions : 
 
 King. How do you, pretty lady ? 
 
 Oph. Well : God 'ild you. They say the owl was a baker's 
 daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we 
 may be. God be at your table ! 
 
 King. Conceit upon her father. 
 
 Oph. Pray you, let's have no words of this ; but when they ask 
 you what it means, say you this : 
 
 [Sings] To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day, etc. 
 
 If they ask you what the story of the owl and the 
 baker's daughter means, it is the sequel to a plain tale 
 of seduction. " You promised me to wed," quoth she. 
 " So I would ha' done," quoth he, " an thou hadst not 
 come to my bed." But he does not express the whole 
 of his reason : it is completed by the story of the owl 
 
 1 It is a question whether Ben Jonson, Chapman, and Marston had 
 seen the wit of this ; for they (or one of them) made nonsense of the verse 
 in their play Eastiuard Ho ! (1605), thus : 
 
 His head as white as milk, 
 All flaxen was his hair j 
 But now he's dead 
 And laid in his bed, 
 And never will come again. 
 God be at your labour ! 
 
 Their play contains also a short part for a foolish footman named Hamlet. 
 
 433 2 F 
 
THE PASSIVE OPHELIA 
 
 and the baker's daughter. We owe the explanation of 
 that to the excellent antiquary, Francis Douce, whose 
 account of the legend contains the relevant particular, 
 although he has not made the application of it. In 
 Gloucestershire the country folk had a legend, that our 
 Saviour entered a bakery and asked for a loaf. The 
 baker's wife took a large piece of dough to place in the 
 oven, but her thrifty daughter thought a small portion of 
 it would be enough ; when, lo ! as if to rebuke her, the 
 Small piece of dough swelled in the baking to an enormous 
 size. For her grudging spirit, our Saviour changed her 
 into an owl, fluffy without and meagre within. Ophelia 
 is eUiptical in recalling the story by its conclusion only. 
 " Lord, we know what we are," is her subtle comment, 
 " but know not what we may be "; — we may change por- 
 tentously from being " in the oven." Her lover's reason 
 was not merely " an thou hadst not come to my bed," 
 but " an thou hadst not got with child." Herein lies 
 the irony of " we must be patient " — we, the women, 
 are passive in these matters. The irony ends with : 
 
 My brother shall know of it : and so I thank you for your good 
 counsel. 
 
 The other recondite piece of artless talk was also in 
 the original text of 1603, but was altered in one small 
 but significant particular in the revisal of 1604, so as to 
 read as follows : 
 
 You must sing down a-down, an you call him a-down-a. O, how 
 the wheel becomes it ! It is the false steward that stole his master's 
 daughter. 
 
 The first quarto has it : 
 
 'Tis a' the king's daughter and the false steward ; and if anybody 
 ask you of anything, say you this : 
 
 To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day, etc. 
 
 The song of seduction was transferred in the revised 
 text from that context to her first mad scene, for two 
 reasons : first, that Laertes should not hear it ; and 
 
 434 
 
HER ARTLESS TALK 
 
 secondly, that it might not point so directly the moral 
 of the false steward ; and at the same time " the king's 
 daughter" becomes "his master's daughter," so that 
 the hearers are not led straight to a scandal in the royal 
 household. Another change in the second quarto was 
 the interpolation of the phrase, "O, how the wheel 
 becomes it ! " The wheel is the refrain or burden of a 
 song, and it was necessary to make it plain that the 
 words " Down-a-down " were the burden of a particular 
 song, which was running in Ophelia's head as appro- 
 priate to the tale of the false steward. It is not far to 
 seek. It is found in Lodge's Rosalynd, the work which 
 Shakespeare had been using a year or two before for 
 the plot of 'As You Like It.' Phoebe, a prudent 
 shepherdess, is wooed by the shepherd Montanus, and 
 replies to his ardent sonnet by one of cold disdain and 
 suspicion : 
 
 A wonder strange to hear — 
 
 Whilst love in deed and word 
 
 Most faithful did appear, 
 
 False semblance came in place, 
 
 By jealousy attended. 
 
 And with a double face 
 
 Both love and fancy blended : 
 
 Which made the gods forsake. 
 
 And men from fancy fly, 
 
 And maidens scorn a make [mating]. 
 Forsooth and so will I : 
 Down a Down ! 
 
 Thus Phyllis sang [the wheel] : 
 
 By fancy once distressed. 
 
 Whoso by foolish love are stung 
 
 Jre worthily oppress'd. 
 
 And so sing I with " Down a down" 
 
 Are worthily oppress'd: that is why she says, " O, 
 how the wheel becomes it," thinking of all that had led 
 to her distressed or " afflicted fancy," her loss of reason, 
 and recognising that the censorious judgment of the 
 prudent Phyllis was true for herself. 
 
 (5) Ophelias language of flowers. — One of the most 
 435 
 
THE PASSIVE OPHELIA 
 
 striking proofs of the author's care for the perfection of 
 his work is the insertion into the text of ' Hamlet,' at 
 some date after he revised the play in the second quarto, 
 of three lines by way of preface to the great scene, the 
 most subtle in all his works, where Ophelia distributes 
 her flowers : 
 
 Nature is fine in love, and where 'tis fine. 
 It sends some precious instance of itself 
 After the thing it loves. 
 
 The lines are tacked on to the speech of Laertes ; but 
 they are not a continuation of his ideas, and might just 
 as well have been spoken by any one else, or more 
 properly by a Chorus. " Nature " here has the same 
 meaning as in "a natural," namely, instinct, without 
 reason, perhaps even without sense -perception, but 
 " fine " or subtle to reach its object. 
 
 Love being thus a light to the darkened reason, 
 nature's subtlety sends some precious instance of itself 
 after the loved object, a message to a vanished love 
 seen only in the mind's eye. The instance here is the 
 bestowal of flowers, and the cleverness of " nature " is 
 in the fitness of their mute language to the respective 
 objects. In the first quarto, Ophelia says as she enters, 
 "la bin gathering of flowers," which she proceeds to 
 give to the three persons present. In the revised 
 edition, the flower-scene is taken second, when she is in 
 a more abstracted mood ; she is now all fancy, recog- 
 nising no one, seeing only imaginary persons. Delius 
 goes so far as to say that even the flowers which she 
 takes from her lap exist only in her imagination ; which 
 is surely an excess of subjectivity. She gives real flowers 
 to real persons, but she does not recognise the persons 
 to whom she gives the respective emblems, nor does 
 she even distinguish the sex of the queen ; she sees 
 three persons in her mind's eye, to whom she will send 
 a token from her world of fancy, and she goes through 
 the ceremony with as much seriousness and naive feeling 
 
 436 
 
HER LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS 
 
 as if she were putting the flowers into the hands of the 
 very persons whom her fancy sees. But she would 
 have done just the same if they had been lay figures. 
 There is, of course, a certain vague appropriateness in 
 the language of the respective flowers to Laertes, 
 Claudius, and Gertrude (which has been made the most 
 of by the commentators) ; but the three who are in 
 Ophelia's thoughts are not present in the flesh ; they 
 are the three Wills of Shakespeare's Sonnets, the 
 three lovers of Mistress Fitton. . To No. i she gives 
 rosemary and pansies. Rosemary was the flower always 
 used at funerals, and is here used for remembrance of a 
 dead love. This is Lord Pembroke : his pet name 
 with Shakespeare was my lord Rose (in the Sonnets), 
 and her name was Mary; which give rosemary: "pray 
 you, love, remember " what has been between us. The 
 Fitton flower was the pansy, which for this occasion 
 must signify thoughts (pensees). Laertes, as if he knew 
 what was in her thoughts, exclaims, "A document in 
 madness, thoughts and remembrance fitted ! " In the 
 first quarto, his words are more heartfelt : " A document 
 in madness ! thoughts, remembrance ! O God ! O God ! " 
 To No. 2 (Claudius) she gives fennel and columbines. 
 Fennel means flattery, dissembling. The columbines 
 were added in the second quarto ; they mean 
 " cuckolded," from their horn-like nectaries : she gives 
 him horns. Neither emblem has any special relevancy 
 to the king ; but to one of the three Wills, namely. Sir 
 William Knollys, they are relevant. In the first quarto, 
 the gift of fennel to No. 2 was followed by a very bold 
 innuendo directly aimed at the same person, which was 
 divided into two in the revised edition, each part being 
 transferred to another context : 
 
 Opi. There's fennel for you, I would a giv'n you some violets, 
 but they all withered when my father died : alas, they say the owl 
 was a baker's daughter, we see what we are but cannot tell what 
 we shall be. For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy. 
 
 The withered violets symbolise her dead infant (the 
 
 437 
 
THE PASSIVE OPHELIA 
 
 violet being a small pansy), which she would have 
 presented to No. 2 had it lived. Next came the fable 
 of the baker's daughter, with the cognate meaning as 
 explained above ; while the whole is completed by the 
 refrain of Bonny sweet Robin. 
 
 To No. 3 (Gertrude) she gives rue, and takes some 
 for herself. The appropriateness of rue for the queen 
 is neither greater nor less than that of the other flowers 
 for Laertes and Claudius. The real person in her 
 mind's eye, for whom the rue was meant, was the 
 remaining Will of the Sonnets, Shakespeare himself. 
 This interpretation has a probability of its own, apart 
 from the general theory of Ophelia's flower-language. 
 Just before ' Hamlet ' was written, Dekker's Satiro- 
 mastix had vindicated Shakespeare's position in the 
 poetic world by making him the king in the play, under 
 the jocular name of William Rufus (which Isaac Disraeli 
 and Gifl?brd have taken in its actual historical sense). 
 He was called William Rufus for his tawny hair, as the 
 Norman king was called so for his red beard ; and 
 from the first syllable of the nickname, his floral 
 name becomes in the play Rue or Herb of Grace, 
 while from his real name it becomes Sweet William. 
 These pleasantries are so near in time to Ophelia's 
 language of flowers that we are led to suspect the 
 same destination of the rue on her part. "We 
 may call it herb-grace o' Sundays," says Ophelia. 
 Steevens, who thought it was the function of a 
 critic to pick faults in his author wherever he could, 
 has pointed out here, that herb-grace is one of the 
 common names of rue, therefore its name on week- 
 days as well as on Sundays. The elucidation of this 
 deep wit is due to Warburton, who is believed to have 
 found the hint of it in another bishop, Jeremy Taylor. 
 Rue, says the latter, was an ingredient of exorcisms, 
 " and from thence, as we suppose, came to be called 
 herb-of-grace." It was in church on Sundays, before the 
 whole congregation, that those exorcising potions were 
 
 438 
 
HER LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS 
 
 administered. Shakespeare confesses to an infatuation 
 for his mistress (in Sonnets 147-150) such as, we may 
 suppose, only exorcisms would have been able to drive 
 out. The common meaning of rue is the same as the 
 verb " to rue." Ophelia keeps some for herself, and tells 
 No. 3 that he may wear his with a difference, the figure 
 being from armorial bearings, but the meaning the 
 simple one of the difference between the man and the 
 woman in respect of consequences. 
 
 Lastly, she takes up a daisy, saying simply, " There's 
 a daisy," giving it to no one. The meaning is doubtless 
 such as in Robert Greene's Qbiipforan Upstart Courtier: 
 " Next them grew the dissembling daisie, to warn such 
 light-o'-love wenches not to trust every false promise 
 that such amorous bachelors make them." But Ophelia 
 gives it to no one : she takes the reflection for herself. 
 
 At the end of the distribution of flowers, Laertes is 
 again the Chorus : 
 
 Thoughts and affliction, passion, hell itself^ 
 She turns to favour and to prettiness. 
 
 Tieck found in this " hell itself" one of his proofs that 
 Ophelia had been proclaiming her unchastity in her 
 lunatic talk. What she was reaUy disclosing was some- 
 thing less gratuitous and more tragic. 
 
 The flowers which Ophelia had made into a garland, 
 and was trying to hang upon the willow when she fell 
 into the water, were chosen and named with care, and 
 of course with wit, in the second quarto. They were 
 crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples " which 
 liberal shepherds give a grosser name," the technical 
 name of the common orchid being the anatomical 
 allegory. Orchis mascula. Lastly, Laertes prays at her 
 funeral that " from her fair and unpolluted flesh may 
 violets spring." Violets are more small pansies ; and 
 the aspiration seems to be, that the person represented 
 by Ophelia might have a legitimate offspring after all — 
 which indeed she had. 
 
 439 
 
THE PASSIVE OPHELIA 
 
 (6) The declaration of the churlish priest. — It is still 
 uncertain whether Ophelia drowned herself or fell into 
 the brook by accident ; the grave-digger thought the 
 former ; but the coroner's jury appear to have found it 
 Christian burial ; and the queen's description of her 
 death makes it accidental. Still, " her death was doubt- 
 ful," and she was buried with " maimed rites." According 
 to the churlish priest, the rites, such as they were, had 
 been enlarged through powerful interest overruling the 
 ecclesiastical canons. The first and second quartos are 
 not agreed as to what rite of burial was denied her. In 
 the former the priest replies to Laertes : 
 
 My lord, we have done all that lies in us, 
 And more than well the church can tolerate : 
 She hath had a dirge sung for her maiden soul. 
 
 In the second quarto, the dirge for her maiden soul is 
 refused her, but she is allowed other -tokens of virginity, 
 to which the churlish priest objects : 
 
 Yet here she is allow'd her virgin crantz.^ 
 
 Her maiden strewments, and the bringing home 
 
 Of bell and burial. 
 
 But he declares that it would be profaning the service 
 of the dead to sing a requiem. It is to be observed 
 that the priest's complaint in both quartos is that she 
 has been buried with the rites due to a chaste virgin. 
 He was clearly of opinion that she was not chaste ; 
 and, as parish priest of Elsinore, he may have had 
 means of knowing, Hamlet inferred from the maimed 
 rites of the funeral that it was a suicide's burial. The 
 priest does not distinguish clearly in his own mind 
 between suicide and the loss of maidenhood. Probably 
 in his parish experiences of young women found 
 
 1 The carrying of a garland or crantz before the corpse of a virgin was 
 an old English custom. Halliwell-Phillipps had information in 1844 of a 
 crantz preserved at St. Alban's Abbey, and of the sexton's tradition that it 
 used to be carried at the funerals of those who died in virginity. 
 
 440 
 
THE CHURLISH PRIEST'S PROTEST 
 
 drowned, the two things were so commonly associated 
 as to be inseparable in his thought.^ 
 
 Hamlet 
 
 After the theory that has been maintained of Shake- 
 speare's private intentions in the play, it hardly needs to 
 be said that Hamlet is the author himself in relation 
 to Mistress Fitton (Ophelia) and to the Comptroller of 
 the Household (Polonius), and in occasional relation 
 to Lord Pembroke, who furnishes some suggestions for 
 the part of Laertes. Hamlet being the author himself 
 in a matter of so private a nature that it can only be 
 treated on the stage with irony and enigma, it is needless 
 to look for some great abstract conception underlying 
 the hero's character and pervading the tragedy : such as 
 Goethe's conception of a soul burdened with a duty too 
 heavy to be borne ; or Werder's, of a man struggling in 
 
 > The name Ofelia, as it is spelled in the first quarto, has been dis- 
 covered in the Arcadia of Sannazaro, a writer of pastorals in Italian (1504). 
 It is there given to a man, an amorous shepherd. Sannazaro had many 
 imitators, including George of Montemayor, v^hose Diana was known to 
 Shakespeare in an English translation ; but neither in that nor in any of 
 the later pastorals does the name of the shepherd Ofelia occur. It is sup- 
 posed to be a modification, or corruption, of the Latin man's name Ofelia. 
 This is an unlikely source for Shakespeare's feminine name, and would 
 suggest no meaning. A more intelligible source may be suggested as follows : 
 In the years 1599 and 1600 much was heard of the name Ofalie, the native 
 Irish name of a tract of country where much of the fighting in Ireland 
 took place, both under Essex and under his successor Mountjoy ; soldiers 
 returning from the war would speak of Ofalie, and the name became 
 prominent in the charges against Essex. It was the native territory of the 
 O'Connors, which had been brought within the English pale fifty years 
 before, but had reverted time after time to the wild Irish. When it was 
 first conquered by the Earl of Sussex, the eastern part of it was annexed to 
 the old county of Kildare, at that time the western limit of the English 
 pale, while the rest of it was erected into two new counties, King's County 
 and Queen's County, called after Philip and Mary. Ofalie was a ivild 
 Irish territory partitioned betiueen three English counties. The aptness of 
 this allegory for Mistress Fitton will be apparent from her relations with 
 the three Wills of the Sonnets. Ofelia is a simple metathesis of Ofalie, a 
 construction on the same lines as Leartes (afterwards Laertes) and Corambis 
 (afterwards Polonius). Ruskin's derivation of it from the Greek starts 
 from the assumption that her brother's name was the Greek Laertes. 
 But it was originally Leartes, which is neither Greek nor anything else. 
 
 441 
 
HAMLET 
 
 a coil of circumstances to make justice have free course 
 on the earth. So far from being abstract, didactic, and 
 harmonised, the theme is personal, empirical, and hetero- 
 geneous. The parts with most unity are those of 
 Ophelia and Polonius. Hamlet is always true to the 
 nature of Shakespeare himself, but of himself in more 
 than one of his real situations : indeed, in the same 
 variety of situations that can be followed in his Sonnets, 
 the lyric sequence of which was finished just at the 
 moment when the dramatic situation of Hamlet begins, 
 Hamlet is, of course, a prince, he could be no less 
 if he were to be the hero of the old Gothic legend ; and, 
 being a prince, it is just as well that he should be the 
 glass of fashion and the mould of form, although so 
 little turns upon that, that he is actually made the anti- 
 thesis of Hercules in one place and fat in another 
 (probably to suit the physique of Burbage, or of some 
 other actor, who had created the part). There was a 
 well-known rule of Horace for dramatic composition, 
 which Shakespeare was familiar with, namely, that if 
 you take up a character who is legendary, or historical, 
 or has been in plays before, being, as it were, established, 
 as that of Orestes was upon the Attic stage, you should 
 keep to the traditional lines. He has done that with 
 ' Hamlet,' most notably in the particular which has 
 been the subject of so much futile discussion — his 
 madness, or affected madness. The madness is quite 
 clearly in the original legend, and is there quite clearly 
 feigned, being the artifice by which the cunning young 
 Goth succeeds in avenging the blood of his father 
 (slain in a fair faction-fight). The adaptation of this 
 barbaric cunning to his own ironical purpose is among 
 the wonders of Shakespeare's genius. So well has he 
 saved the appearance of the traditional Hamlet, that 
 even Dekker, who was his ally, and perhaps as deep in 
 his literary confidence as most, cites Hamlet in his 
 writings of 1608 and 1609 as the same unaccountable 
 and ranting avenger who was proverbial in the mouths 
 
 442 
 
SHAKESPEARE HIMSELF 
 
 of London playgoers, and had been mentioned by 
 Dekker himself once before in a work previous to 
 the production of Shakespeare's play. That stereotyped 
 notion ought to have been displaced or shaken by the 
 profound soliloquies, which were elaborated in the 
 second quarto ; but, on the other hand, the original idea 
 of mad Hamlet was reverted to adroitly in the last Act, 
 by making him rant at the funeral of Ophelia, the tradi- 
 tion of the stage being that Burbage leapt into the grave 
 after Laertes and struggled with him therein, quite in 
 the manner of the Hamlet of Paris Garden who is 
 referred to by Dekker. 
 
 In all his set speeches and soliloquies, Hamlet is 
 expressing thoughts and feelings which are proper to 
 Shakespeare, and can be found in the Sonnets or in 
 earlier or subsequent plays. Of the four great solilo- 
 quies, the last, in the fourth Act, was struck out in the 
 author's final revision. Two others, " O, that this too 
 too solid flesh," and " To be, or not to be," are upon 
 the theme of suicide, which was no stranger to Shake- 
 speare's thoughts : it can be found in one of the 
 sonnets, and it is introduced into 'King Lear* in so 
 chastened a spirit that we seem to hear the voice of one 
 who had gained the victory over himself : 
 
 Men must endure 
 Their going hence, even as their coming hither : 
 Ripeness is all. 
 
 The other soliloquy, " O, what a rogue and peasant slave 
 am I," is also a self-revelation of the author. It is 
 exactly the supine behaviour, in the Sonnets, when he 
 was robbed of his mistress by his friend ; and the same 
 reproduced, as if he would adhere to it and justify it, 
 in ' The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' where Valentine 
 is actually called a peasant, in contrast with the high- 
 born arbitrary Proteus, and is made to forgive the 
 wound to his honour as if he had been a primitive 
 Christian turning the other cheek. Equally true of 
 
 443 
 
HAMLET 
 
 Shakespeare the poet, and the necessary complement of 
 his character, is the proud and scornful treatment of his 
 enemies, and the sublime belief in himself, in that most 
 intense and burning outburst, "Look here on this picture 
 and on this." 
 
 Lastly, there are three reminiscences in the play 
 which reveal Shakespeare the man, in the pleasing light 
 of paying pious reverence or willing admiration to the 
 merits of others. The first is of his father, John Shake- 
 speare, who was buried at Stratford on 9 th September 
 1 60 1, about the time when ' Hamlet ' was under hand : 
 
 He was a man, take him for all in all, 
 I shall not look upon his like again. 
 
 Let us cherish the pious belief that the son wrote in 
 those lines when he came back from his father's 
 funeral. 
 
 Another of Hamlet's recollections is of Yorick, the 
 king's jester, whose skull was recognised by the grave- 
 digger : 
 
 Alas, poor Yorick ! I knew him, Horatio : a fellow of infinite 
 jest, of most excellent fancy. . . . Where be your gibes now? your 
 gambols ? your songs ? your flashes of merriment that were wont to 
 set the table on a roar ? 
 
 This is the greatest comic genius of that age, long 
 remembered after his death like another Grimaldi, Dick 
 Tarleton, whom Shakespeare would have gone to see in 
 his famous part of Derick in the old play of Prince Hal, 
 Sir John Oldcastle, Ned Poins, Gadshill, and others, at 
 the Bull in Bishopsgate, when he came to London in 
 1587. Tarleton died the next year, on 5th September 
 1588 (and was buried in St. Leonard's Church, Shore- 
 ditch) ; but " I knew him, Horatio," and it was some- 
 thing to have known, for even a brief space, a player of 
 so ready wit — a fellow of such infinite jest and excellent 
 fancy. One can believe that he was the first to rouse 
 the enthusiasm of the youth from Stratford, and to fill 
 him with boundless admiration. The tribute to Tarleton 
 
 444 
 
HIS TRIBUTE TO YORICK 
 
 in the graveyard scene, under a name slightly varied 
 from that of his famous part of Derick, is very deliberate. 
 In the first quarto, Yorick's skull had lain in the earth, 
 as near as the grave-digger could remember, " this dozen 
 year," and he bethinks him that it was ever "since 
 our last King Hamlet slew Fortinbrasse in combat." 
 Counting back a round dozen of years from the winter 
 of 1 60 1, and taking the great combat nearest to that 
 limit of time, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, we 
 should arrive at the year, and almost at the month, of 
 Tarleton's death, September 1588. In the second quarto 
 it was thought expedient to make Hamlet quite definitely 
 a man of thirty (although in the first quarto his mother 
 had addressed him " How now, boy ") ; and as Yorick, 
 the king's jester, had carried the boy prince on his back, 
 it became necessary to add some ten years to the period 
 since the jester's death, making it, in the second edition, 
 " three and twenty years," and to transfer the combat 
 with Fortinbras to another context. The patching in 
 the second quarto is obvious : the original and domi- 
 nant intention had been to mark the date of Yorick's 
 death, so that he might be identified with Dick Tarleton 
 through his well-known part of Derick.^ 
 
 The third tribute of personal admiration which 
 Shakespeare introduced into 'Hamlet' is the famous 
 compliment to Horatio while they are waiting for the 
 play to begin : 
 
 Ham. What ho ! Horatio ! 
 
 Hor. Here, sweet lord, at your service. 
 
 Ham. Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man 
 As e'er my conversation coped w^ithal. 
 
 Hor. O, my dear lord, — 
 
 Ham. Nay, do not think I flatter : 
 
 For what advancement may I hope from thee 
 
 1 Halliwell-Phillipps is mistaken in supposing that Spenser meant 
 Tarleton by " our pleasant Willy who is dead of late," in his Tears of the 
 Muses (1591). It was Sir Philip Sydney who was called Willy, as appears 
 from the elegy upon him in Davison's Poetical Rapsodie (pointed out by 
 Minto). Perhaps the name was suggested by the river of his Arcadia, the 
 Willy near Wilton. 
 
 445 
 
HAMLET 
 
 That no revenue hast but thy good spirits, 
 
 To feed and clothe thee ? Why should the poor be flattered ? 
 
 No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp. 
 
 And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee 
 
 Where thrift may follow fawning. Dost thou hear ? 
 
 Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice 
 
 And could of men distinguish, her election 
 
 Hath seal'd thee for herself; for thou hast been 
 
 As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing, 
 
 A man that fortune's buffets and rewards 
 
 Hast ta'en with equal thanks. . . . 
 
 Horatio has little opportunity, in the play, of showing 
 what sterling stufF he is made of : only in the last scene 
 does he get a chance, and proves to be more an antique 
 Roman than a Dane. But for the eulogy paid to him 
 in set terms, we should never have known that he had 
 no revenue but his good spirits to feed and clothe him, 
 that he had had sufferings and had met the buffets of 
 fortune with equanimity, that he was as just a man as 
 Hamlet knew, and that for all those qualities he was 
 Hamlet's dearest friend. Those particulars about 
 Horatio are so much outside the action of the play that, 
 excepting the last, they must be understood of some real 
 person whose attachment to him the author wanted to 
 "pay home," as he repaid the honest old counsellor 
 Gonzalo in 'The Tempest.' One would wish very 
 much to know who this friend of Shakespeare's was. 
 He was certainly a poor man, making a precarious 
 livelihood, doubtless by his pen. There are several 
 things which point to honest Tom Dekker. Among 
 the author's known intimates we may exclude Fletcher 
 as not in all respects the man who is there described. 
 George Chapman was indeed a man who deserved 
 much of the praise given to Horatio, and other praise 
 as well ; but for him, as I believe, was reserved the 
 compliment of standing for the great part of Ulysses. 
 Thomas Heywood must surely have merited the palm 
 for modesty, gentleness, and Christian charity which 
 Lamb has awarded to him ; but he also has been 
 
 446 
 
HIS TRIBUTE TO HORATIO 
 
 honoured elsewhere, in my view, by being made virtually 
 the captain of the ship in ' The Tempest,' although he 
 was merely boatswain. To the same group of good 
 fellows and honest men belongs Dekker. Ben Jonson, 
 in The Poetaster (1601), describes him thus: "His 
 doublet's a little decayed ; he is otherwise a very 
 simple, honest fellow, sir, one Demetrius, a dresser of 
 plays about the town here." One of Dekker 's best- 
 known lyrics is "O sweet content," which is an old 
 theme of Greene's, but sounds more genuine from 
 Dekker's mouth, and is precisely the quality most 
 marked in the eulogy of Horatio. It is undoubted 
 that he was in close relations with Shakespeare just 
 before ' Hamlet ' was written ; for his Satiromastix ex- 
 presses so directly the reply on Shakespeare's behalf to 
 the attack upon him that he has even been conjectured 
 to have written some of the more dignified lines himself. 
 Such amenities were happily not rare among the 
 old playwrights. " Detraction," says Webster in 
 the preface to one of his plays, "is the sworn friend 
 to ignorance : for mine own part, I have ever truly 
 cherished my good opinion of other men's worthy 
 labours, especially of that full and heightened style of 
 Master Chapman, the laboured and understanding works 
 of Master Jonson, the no less worthy composures of the 
 both worthily excellent Master Beaumont and Master 
 Fletcher ; and lastly (without wrong last to be named) 
 the right happy and copious industry of Master Shake- 
 speare, Master Decker, and Master Heywood, wishing 
 what I write may be read by their light." 
 
 447 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abbot, Edwin A., on Bacon's weak 
 
 memory, 94 
 Achilles, in 'Tro. and Ores.,' divergences 
 
 of, from Classical, 329 ; meant for 
 
 Shakespeare himself, 33Z 
 Adrian, original of, in 'Tempest,' 98 
 iSneas, in 'Tro. and Cres.,' meant for 
 
 Fulke Greville, 34J 
 Aguecheek, Sir Andrew, original of, 291 
 
 note 
 ' All's Well that Ends Well,' real persons 
 
 in, 165, 257 J date of, 179 ; initials 
 
 G and E on folio margin, 263 mie 
 Alonso, in 'Tempest,' meant for Pem- 
 broke, 82 
 Anagram in AUen^ 33 ; in Laertes, 412 
 Angela, in ' Meas. for Meas.,' original of, 
 
 352. 363, 371-80 
 Antenor, in ' Tro. and Cres.,' 320 
 Antonio, in 'Tempest,' drawn from 
 
 Southampton, 91-92, loi, 107 
 Arbury Hall,' portraits at, 50 ; moated 
 
 grange near. See Temple House 
 Archer, William, on the three ff^ilh, 53, 
 
 38s 
 Ariel, allegory of, 275-6, 297, 301, 
 
 308 
 Armado, Don, drawn from B. Barnes, 
 
 160-65 
 'As You Like It,' personal matter in, 
 
 266-9 
 Avisa. See Willobie 
 
 Bacon, Sir Francis, Francisco in ' Tempest,' 
 90, 93 ; relations with Essex, 93-94; 
 with Southampton, 109-112; supposed 
 Shakespeare's "ghost," 123 
 
 Barnes, Barnabe, author of Lecrine, 146 ; 
 SelimuSf etc., 149; his career, 155; 
 Shakespeare's literary assistant, 173-9 ) 
 original of Strumbo, 147 ; of Basilisco, 
 153 ; of Pistol, 214 iiiite, 241 ; of 
 Don Armado, 160-65; °^ ParoUes, 
 165-73 
 
 Basilisco, a part written by Shakespeare 
 for Kyd, 140, 153 ; first sketch of 
 Pistol, 153 
 Beaumont, Francis, original of Diomed, 
 340 ; supplies hints for 'Tro. and Cres.,' 
 340 note; connection with "Take, 
 O take," 367 ; on Mary Fitton, 372 
 " Begetter, the onlie," the joke of, 19, 68 
 Belch, Sir Toby, original of, 291 mie 
 Bertram, in 'All's Well,' etc., original 
 
 of, 257-65 
 Bird, Avis, probable real name of "Avisa," 
 
 »97 
 
 Biron, in 'L. L. Lost,' meant for the 
 author, 49, 373 
 
 Boaden, James, his theory of Shake- 
 speare's Sonnets, 1, 33 
 
 Boatswain, the, in ' Tempest,' meant for 
 Heywood, 286 ; why a pirate, 288 
 
 Breton, Nicholas, mentions Pistol before 
 1597, 239; supplies ideas for 'Rom. 
 and Jul.,' 240 ; Shakespeare writes 
 commendatory verses for, 241 note 
 
 Brown, Charles Armitage, on S. cxxi., 
 
 65 
 Butler, Samuel, on Shakespeare's Sonnets, 
 I ; on Southampton's hair, 213 
 
 Caesar, Dr. Julius, legal attendant on the 
 Queen, 389 
 
 Caliban, allegory of, 307 
 
 Camden, William, on Fulke Greville, 87 j 
 and Shakespeare's coat-of-arms, 88 ; on 
 Southampton's trial, 112 note 
 
 Campion, Thomas, epigrams on Barnes, 
 157, 165, 168 
 
 Cecil, Sir Robert, befriends Southampton, 
 111; entertained at a play, 207 ; and 
 'Richard II.,' 247 
 
 Chapman, George, supposed the Rival 
 Poet, 34; as Ulysses in 'Tro. and 
 Cres.,' 335-7 
 
 Chettle, Henry, his apology to Shake- 
 speare, 144 
 
 449 
 
 2 G 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S STORY OF HIS LIFE 
 
 Christmas, sonnet on, 71-73 
 Churchyard, Thomas, probable author of 
 
 MS. ballad, 47; on Barnes, 158; as 
 
 Nestor, in 'Tro. and Cres.,' 341; 
 
 author of Muca^ Tale to DiJo, 342 
 
 note 
 Claudius in ' Hamlet,' a composite part, 
 
 253,406-11 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, on 'Richard 
 
 II.,' 243; on Angelo, 351 
 Coles, Peter, on Awsa, 191 
 Collier, John Payne, on old ballads, 102 
 
 mtej on Dido and AEmas, 206, 358 ; 
 
 on music of songs, 367 note 
 ' Comedy of Errors,' collaboration in, 
 
 215 
 Corambis, derivation of, 387 
 Crailc, George Lillie, on ' Love's Labour's 
 
 Won,' 143 mte 
 'Cymbeline,' traces of another pen in, 
 
 174-9 J affinities to 'All's Well,' 
 
 179 note 
 
 Daniel, Samuel, the Rival Poet of the 
 Sonnets, 32 - 37 ; on the heroine of 
 ff^illohie his Avisa, 192, 202 ; the 
 Master in 'Tempest,' 286 ; his Muso- 
 philus^ 32 X, 347 j as Agamemnon in 
 'Tro. and Cres.,' 333 
 
 Davies, Sir John, servant -in -ordinary, 
 40 note ; as Asinius in Satiromastix^ 
 277 ; original of Aguecheek, 291 note 
 
 Davies, John, of Hereford, epigram on 
 Shakespeare, 269 note 
 
 Davison, Francis, on the vacant laureate- 
 ship, 40 ; prints verses on " widow 
 Dido," 204 
 
 Delcker, Thomas, his Satiromastix, 276, 
 279, 281, 284; "the swabber," 285, 
 447 ; his references to Hamlet, 442 ; 
 compliment to, as Horatio, 445 
 
 Diana of Montemayor, MS. translation 
 of, 225 
 
 Dido, " widow," joke of, in ' Tempest,' 
 explained, 204-7 
 
 Dido and ySneas, authorship of, 206, 
 
 343 «"" 
 Diomed, in 'Tro. and Cres.,' meant for 
 
 F. Beaumont, 339 
 Divit's Charter, The, tragedy by Barnes, 
 
 146, 174 
 Douce, Francis, explains obscure passages, 
 
 301. 434 
 
 Dove-house, the, in 'Rom. and Jul.,' a 
 reminiscence of Stratford, 304 
 
 Drayton, Michael, on state of the stage, 
 127; on Cerberon, 166 note; on an 
 amorous poet, 187 j on the English 
 Helicon, 194; on "Olcon," 255 
 
 45 
 
 Drummond, William, on Ben Jonson, 
 
 278 
 Dryden, John, on Mercutio, 234 
 Dumaine, drawn from Southampton, 49, 
 
 115, 212 
 
 "Earthquake, the," in 'Rom. and Jul.,' 
 
 304 
 Edward III., collaborators in, 210 ; 
 
 proof of Southampton's hand in, 213 
 Elizabeth, Queen, and Mistress Fitton, 
 
 47, 56, 380; the "humorous" Duke 
 
 in 'As You Like It,' 268-70; the 
 
 Moon in her fifth week in 'Tempest,' 
 
 103-4 
 Elsinore, castle of, taken from Braun's 
 
 Civitates, 398 note 
 Escalus, in ' Meas. for Meas.,' original of, 
 
 370 
 Essex, Robert Earl of, his conspiracy, in 
 the Sonnets, 29 - 30 j in ' "Tempest,' 
 xoi se^. ; original of Sebastian, 105 ; 
 of Henry V., 241 ; of Hector, 343 ; 
 of Coriolanus, 343 ; hears of ' Richard 
 II.,' 247 J in a play by Heywood, 288 ; 
 relations with Southampton, 91, 109- 
 12, 246, 263; with Bacon, 93; his 
 oracle, 259-60 
 
 Fabian, in 'Twelfth Night,' meant for 
 the author, 270 
 
 'Fitton, Sir Edward, his letter to Cecil, 56 
 
 Fitton, Mary, at Court, 45, 53 ; the 
 " white doe," 46 j her portrait and 
 effigy, 50 ; Rosaline of ' L. L. Lost,' 
 49 J the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, 5 1 
 sef. ; her still-born child, 58 j her 
 second mishap, 45, 59 sej. ; con- 
 tracted to Sir W. KnoUys, 54, 364, 
 371-2; the "little western flower" 
 of 'M.N.D.,' 226; suggestion of, in 
 Sycorax, 293, 299-300; in part 
 Cressida, 348 ; original of Mariana, 
 354. 362-S. 371. 378 ; in part Ophelia, 
 428,431,437; her wit, 372 
 
 Fletcher, John, original of Patroclus, 
 
 333. 338 
 Florio, John, the sonnet to, by Phaeton, 
 
 164 ; supposed original of Holofernes, 
 
 160 ; his testimony of Southampton, 
 
 182 ; intimate with Barnes, 159, 162 ; 
 
 patronised by Southampton, 1 19 
 Flowers, language of, in ' Hamlet,' 435-9 
 Ford, Mrs., in ' M. W. of W.,' original 
 
 of, 51, 269 
 Francisco, in 'Tempest,' drawn from 
 
 Bacon, 90-97 
 Furnivall, F. J., on Tyler's theory of the 
 
 Sonnets, 4 
 
INDEX 
 
 Garter, mine host of the, original of, 
 215 note 
 
 German (or Jermyn), Sir Thomas, and 
 Southampton, 262, 263 note 
 
 Goethe, J. W., on ' Hamlet,' 383 ; on 
 Ophelia, 416 
 
 Gonzalo,in 'Tempest,' drawn from Fulke 
 Greville, 86-90 
 
 Greene, Robert, his attack on Shake- 
 scene, 133, 144; joint -author of 
 'Taming of a Shrew,' 142 ; ballad of 
 " The Enchanted Island," 102 note 
 
 Greville, Fulke, original of Gonzalo, 
 
 87 ; of Lafeu, 170 j of Le Beau, 268 ; 
 of Escalus, 370 ; befriends Shakespeare, 
 
 88 ; charged with peculation, 90 note 
 Grosart, A. B., editor, 41, 149, 192 
 
 note 
 
 Hallam, Henry, accepts Boaden's theory, 
 26 ; on Shakespeare's obscurities, 382 
 
 Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O., cites marriage 
 licence, 302 note ; on Shakespeare's 
 flight from home, 305 ; on editions of 
 'Tro. and Cres.,' 318 note 
 
 'Hamlet,' an avowed mystery, 381; 
 Goethe on, 3835 use of irony in, 395 ; 
 a Tragedy of Errors, 401 ; "Eneas' 
 Tale to Dido " in, 342, note ; first 
 quarto of, 414 
 
 Hamlet, the disorder of his dress, 424, 
 42$ note; his irony, 410 ; his supposed 
 irresolution, 40 z ; his soliloquies ex- 
 press Shakespeare's thoughts, 443 ; real 
 object of his revenge, 402 ; intention 
 of his affected madness, 441-2 
 
 Harington, Sir John, translator of 
 Orlando Furioso, 29 1 ; original of Sir 
 Toby Belch, 291 note 
 
 Harvey, Gabriel, original of Holofernes, 
 160 J his praise of Barnes, 158; 
 rhyming friend of Florio, 164 note; 
 the Harcoof ^WM, 189, 203 
 
 Hathway, Ann, supplies ideas for 
 Sycorax, 299, 302 
 
 Helen, in ' Tro. and Cres.,' 349 
 
 Helena, in ' M.N.D.,' 223; in 'All's 
 Well,' 257 lej. 
 
 Heminge and Condell, instructed to 
 dedicate the Folio, 256, 290 
 
 ' Henry IV.,' the part of Shallow in, 270 
 
 'Henry V.,' original form of, 235-42; 
 date of, 239 
 
 ' Henry VI.,' history of the three parts, 
 
 i30-33..'4>-3 
 Henry, Prince of Wales, account of his 
 baptism used by Shakespeare, 2z6 ; 
 supposed reference to his death in 
 '"Tempest,' 102 
 
 Henslowe, Philip, his Diary cited, 141, 
 
 205-6 
 HeiDs in S. xx. explained, 22 
 Heywood, Thomas, borrows plot of 
 
 Avisa, 183, 194 note} original of the 
 
 Boatswain in ' Tempest,' 286-8 ; 
 
 Lamb's eulogy on, 286 ; named with 
 
 Shakespeare by Webster, 447 
 Holinshed's CAronic/es, plots taken from, 
 
 z 14 note ; their lesson of Richard II., 
 
 247_ 
 Horatio, compliment to, meant for 
 
 Dekker, 446 
 ' Humours, The,' original name of 
 
 'M.N.D.,' 229 
 Hunter, Joseph, on sources of ' Tempest,' 
 
 292 ; on original of Polonius, 394, 
 
 "Ignoto," signature in England's Helicon, 
 
 231 note 
 Irony, use of, in ' Hamlet,' 395 
 Italics, use of, in the Sonnets, 20 
 
 yack Drtttn's Entertainment, personalities 
 
 in, 273, 331-2 
 Johnson, Samuel, on Bertram, 264 ; on 
 
 ' M. W. of W. ' and ' Tro. and Cres.,' 
 
 215 mtei on Shakespeare's personalities 
 
 in plays, 316 
 Jonson, Benjamin, original of Stephano 
 
 in 'Tempest,' 277 ; of Ajax in 'Tro. 
 
 and Cres.,' 328 ; his epigram "Poet 
 
 Ape," 283 ; Drummond on, 277-8 ; 
 
 his relations with Marston, 276, 325 ; 
 
 dedicates " Epigrams " to Pembrolce, 
 
 283 ; his appreciation of Shakespeare, 
 
 Juliet, her age at marriage, 304 
 
 Kempe, Will, his dedication to "Anne 
 
 Fitton," 37Z 
 ' King Lear,* part of Poor Tom in, 136-9 ; 
 
 first production of, 146, 174 
 King Leir, old play assigned to Barnes, 
 
 149 
 Knollys, Sir Francis, eulogy on, by 
 
 Churchyard, 342 
 Knollys, Sir William, protector of Mistress 
 
 Fitton, 53 ; contracted to her, 54-55, 
 
 364, 371-25 one of the three ^//j, 
 
 53 ; original of Adrian, 98-100 ; of 
 
 Malvolio, 291 Kote; of Angelo, 370- 
 
 80 ; of Polonius, 393 seq. 
 Kyd, Thomas, plays ascribed to, 130, 
 
 134; his life, 136; original of Poor 
 
 Tom in ' King Lear," 1 36-9 
 
 451 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S STORY OF HIS LIFE 
 
 Laertes, a composite part, 412-14 
 
 Lamb, Charles, on Heywood, z86 ; on 
 Polonius, 392 
 
 Lameness, Shakespeare's, figurative mean- 
 ing of, 57 
 
 Laurence, Friar, his cold comfort adapted 
 from Breton, 240 
 
 " Lilies that fester," why quoted from 
 Edward III., 212-14 
 
 Locrine, authorship of, 146 ; comic scene 
 of, rewritten by Shakespeare, 147 
 
 Lodge, Thomas, his Rosalynd, 266, 282 
 
 Lodowick, in Edioard III., drawn by 
 Shakespeare from Barnes, 172 
 
 * Lover's Complaint,' annexed to the 
 Sonnets, 19 ; heroine of, 369 ; cor- 
 ruptions of its text corrected, 415 
 
 ^ Love's Labour's Lost,' real persons in, 
 48 ; acted partly by amateurs, 49 ; 
 Southampton's share in, 230 note 
 
 ' Love's Labour's Won,' name intended 
 for 'T. of Shrew,' 143 mte 
 
 ' Lucrece, Rape of,' connected with^f ;m, 
 184-6 
 
 Lucy, Sir Thomas, original of Shallow, 
 270, 388; a "minister" of Sycorax, 
 305-6 
 
 'Macbeth,' collaboration in, 173, 177, 
 
 179 
 Malone, Edmond, on vacancy in laureate- 
 ship, 38 i on ' 2 and 3 Hen, VL,' 131 
 Malvolio, original of, 270, 291 mte 
 Mariana, her situation that of Mistress 
 
 Fitton, 354-72 
 Marlowe, Christopher, author of ' 2 Hen. 
 
 VL,' 131-2 
 Marston, John, original of Trinculo, 272 ; 
 
 of Thersites, 324 j probably of Nym, 
 
 215 note 
 Mathew, Sir Tobie, records birth of 
 
 Mistress Fitton's child, 56 
 ' Measure for Measure,' real persons in, 
 
 351-71 ; ballad source of, 359 
 ' Merchant of Venice,' date of, 209 ; 
 
 rival editions of, 218 ; source of, in 
 
 Italian, 219 
 Mercutio, a part by Southampton, 233 j 
 
 why Shakespeare killed him in the 
 
 third Act, 234 
 Merdon Castle, described in Awsa, 195 
 Meres, Francis, advertises Shakespeare's 
 
 works, 250 
 ' Merry Wives of Windsor,' real persons 
 
 in, zumte ,■ written at Queen's desire, 
 
 269 
 Metatheses, in Caliban, 307 ; Argier, 
 
 300; Trinculo, 274; Ophelia, 441 
 
 note 
 
 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' rival 
 
 editions of, 220 ; embellishments on, 
 
 221 ; sources of, 224-9 > originally 
 
 ' The Humours," 229 
 Milton, John, on Shakespeare's " Delphic 
 
 lines," 18 
 Minto, William, on Phaeton's sonnet, 
 
 164 rate; on 'pleasant Willy,' 445 
 
 mte i on Marston, 324 
 Miranda, allegory of, 256, 289 
 Montegut, Emile, theory of 'The 
 
 Tempest,' 79 mte 
 Mottoes, played upon, in Sonnets, 25 ; in 
 
 'Tro. and Cres.,' 339-40 
 Murray, Dr. A. S., on Parthenon subjects 
 
 in Bottom's verses, 228 
 Muudorus, authorship of, 152 mte 
 Musophiltts, a poem hy Daniel, pun upon 
 
 name, 34 ; lines in, on Stonehenge, 
 
 referred to in S. Ixxviii., 36 ; plan of 
 
 'Tro. and Cres.' suggested by, 321 ; 
 
 hint for Troilus taken from, 347 
 
 Nash, Thomas, joint-author of ' Tam. of a 
 Shrew,' 133, 142 ; describes B. Barnes, 
 
 ^iS, iS4> 156, 158. 164. '7°. >7i ; 
 attacks G. Harvey, 164 mte 
 Newdigate, Anne, sister of Mary Fitton, 
 
 364 
 Newdigate-Newdegate, Lady, her Gossip 
 
 Jrom a Muniment Room, 45, 366, 385 
 Nurse, the, in ' Rom. and Jul.,' knows 
 
 Shakespeare's domestic affairs, 304 
 Nym, original of, 214 note 
 
 ' Olcon,' a noble patron, 255, 256 note 
 
 Ophelia, the central figure in ' Hamlet,' 
 417 ; the time-scheme made to suit 
 her, 419-21 ; demure in first Acts, 
 420; her secret, 42 1; cause of Hamlet's 
 agitation, 425 ; at the play-scene, 426 ; 
 her songs, 429-33 ; her artless talk, 
 433-5 J her flower-language, 436-9 ; 
 her funeral, 440 
 
 Orlando, Shakespeare the original of, 
 266-71 
 
 Othello, his epilepsy, 425 
 
 ParoUes, drawn from B. Barnes, 165-73 
 
 Parthenon, eastern pediment of, in 
 Bottom's doggerel, 228 
 
 ' Passionate Pilgrim, The,' surreptitious, 
 51, 186, 230 note 
 
 Patroclus, meant for Fletcher, 338 
 
 Pecle, George, 133, 140 
 
 Pembroke, Earl of (William Herbert), 
 his baronial titles in the Sonnets, 22 j 
 his armorial bearings, 25 ; his mottoes, 
 25 ; becomes intimate with Shake- 
 
 452 
 
INDEX 
 
 speare, z6 ; and with Mistress Fitton, 
 27, 51 ; associating witli South- 
 ampton, 27, ZI2 ; in favour at Court, 
 41, 57 ; supports Daniel for the 
 laureateship, 37, 41 ; Shakespeare 
 bids him " farewell," 43 ; his amour 
 with Mistress Fitton, 57 j the father 
 of her still-born child, 58 ; sonnets 
 to, resumed after long interval, 60 ; 
 pleaded with to father second child, 
 60-64 i his angry refusal, 64 ; im- 
 prisoned for Fitton scandal, 56, 65 ; 
 denounced by Shakespeare as an in- 
 former, 7 1 ; Proteus in ' T. G. of Ver.,' 
 52 ; Alonso in 'Tempest,' 102, 290 j 
 as Troilus, 346 ; as Laertes in part, 
 41Z ; dedication of Sonnets to, 19 ; 
 of Folio to, 256, 290 J of Ben Jonson's 
 Epigrams to, 283 ; his patronage of 
 Jonson, 277 ; his character by Clar- 
 endon, 27, 57, 257 
 ' Pericles,' collaboration in, 174 ; the 
 
 enigma in, 384 
 Phaeton, sonnet by, 164 note 
 Pistol, original of, 150, 153-4, 241 
 Plagiarism, Shakespeare accused of, by 
 Greene, 132-3, 144; by Jonson, z8i ; 
 his defence of, 281, 333 
 Plautus, an Interlude from his Amphi- 
 tryon^ used by Shakespeare, 216 
 ' Poet Ape ' epigram on Shakespeare, 283 
 Poetaster, The, personalities in, 273-4, 
 
 276, 281 
 Poet-laureateship, in the Sonnets, 37, 43 
 Polonius, the part of, 391-3 ; original 
 
 of, 393 xq. 
 Posthumus, a Barnsian character, 174 
 Prospero, Shakespeare the original of, 80, 
 
 29S ; a difficult part to act, 3x3 
 Proteus, in ' T. G. of Ver.,' original of, 
 
 26, 52. 4+3 
 Puns, upon Fitzhew, 22 ; Ros, 22 ; 
 Musofhilus, 34 ; Churchyard, 341 ; 
 Marston, 326 ; Chapman, 336 ; 
 Dekker, 285 ; Boston, 286 ; Julius 
 Caesar, 391 j Constable, 233 
 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter, described in MS. 
 
 ballad, 47 ; refers to ' Richard II.,' 
 
 Z47 
 'Richard II.,' referred to in Raleigh's 
 
 letter, 247 ^ collaboration in, 244-5 > 
 
 politics of, 245-8 
 Roland, Childe, meaning of, in ' K, Lear,' 
 
 138 note 
 ' Romeo and Juliet,' collaboration in,23 1 j 
 I I the Nurse's reminiscences in, 304 
 Rosaline, in 'L. L. Lost,' meant for 
 
 Mistress Fitton, 49-50, 373 
 
 Ros of Kendal, title of Lord Herbert, 22 
 Rowe, Nicholas, his biography of Shake- 
 speare cited, 116, 304-5 
 Rutland, Earl of (Roger Manners), sonnet 
 to, 163 ; the Rogero of Avisa, 203 
 
 Salisbury Cathedral, sonnet at, 74 
 
 Sebastian, drawn from Lord Essex, lox, 
 105 
 
 Selimus, authorship of, 149-51 
 
 Shakespeare, Ann, poet's wife, as Sycorax, 
 302-5 
 
 Shakespeare, John, poet's father, probable 
 references to, 303 note, 444 
 
 Shakespeare, William — marriage, 302 ; 
 domestic troubles, 303-4; the Lucy 
 afFair, 305 ; flight from home, 304 j 
 return, 305 ; becomes actor, 305 j 
 Phaeton's sonnet (Florio), 164 ; Talbot 
 scenes in ' i Hen. VI.' (Barnes), 
 129, 152; comic scenes for Kyd, 
 140 ; attacked by Greene, 132, 144; 
 buys old plays, 143 j writes ' Venus and 
 Adonis' when theatres closed, 185; 
 literary motto, 1 26 ; intimacy with 
 Southampton begins, 115, 155, 185; 
 dedicates 'Lucrece,' 185; oversees 
 Locrine, 147-8 ; assists Southampton 
 in Avisa, 185-8; collaborates with 
 Southampton in six plays, 209 seq. ; 
 actor at Court, 269 ; acquaintance witli 
 Mistress Fitton, 49, 226, 372 ; helped 
 by patron's money, 116-17, 271 ; P"'^ 
 name on title-pages, 250; intimate with 
 Lord Herbert, 22-26; claims twelve 
 plays through Meres, 142, 250 ; satirises 
 Lucy, 270, 305 ; aspires to be Poet 
 Laureate, 37; thrown over by Herbert, 
 43, 115 ; plotted against by South- 
 ampton, 115, 119-20, 251; obtains 
 coat-of-arms, 88, 306 ; befriended by 
 Fulke Greville, 88, 306 ; incurs 
 Queen's anger, 269 ; accused of 
 plagiarism by Jonson, 280-83; <iefended 
 in Satiromastix, 276, 325 ; alleged 
 father of Fitton child, 254; tries to 
 persuade Lord Herbert to marry 
 Mistress Fitton, 60 - 64 ; attends 
 funeral of second Earl of Pembroke, 
 70, 74 ; quarrels with Pembroke, 70 ; 
 sympathy with Mistress Fitton, 72, 
 369-70 ; impeached in filiation case, 
 71 ; revenge upon Knollys, 386 sef. ; 
 becomes unsociable, 331 ; prosperous, 
 271, 332; enmity with Jonson, 281, 
 328 ; intimacy with Fletcher, 338-9 ; 
 employs Barnes for plots, 146 ; Chap- 
 man his friend, 331, 337; a^ection for 
 Dekker, 285 ; tribute to Hey wood, 
 
 453 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S STORY OF HIS LIFE 
 
 286-8 ; expectations from James I., 
 85 ; in retirement, 74, 80, 298 ; re- 
 conciliation with Pembroke, 256 ; 
 projected revision for press, 306 ; 
 naturally religious, 73, 302, 308 5 
 modern, 74.; vindictive, 281, 353; 
 always witty, 18, 59-60, 282, 372, 
 376; a book-lover, 118; works up 
 his own experiences, 332-3 ; not a 
 laborious student, 333; believes in 
 himself, 309, 444 
 
 Shallow, Justice, an unfair caricature in 
 ' 2 Hen. IV.,' 270 
 
 Sidney Letters on Mistress Fitton's ill- 
 ness, 58 ; on Essex's device, 96 ; on 
 Southampton's false locks, 213 
 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, and Barnabe Barnes, 
 170 
 
 Slender, meant for Francis Thynne, 
 214 «o«, 306 
 
 Soliman and Perseda, Shakespeare's part 
 in, 140 
 
 Sonnets, Shakespeare's, their depth and 
 wit, 18, 59 ; dedication of, 19, 283 ; 
 quotations of — 
 I. 22 \,. 60 
 
 XVII. 60 ci. 60 
 
 XIX. 25 cm. 60 
 
 XX. 22 CIV. 61 
 
 XXXI. 24 cv. 25, 26 
 
 XXXVI. 52 , cvi. 74 
 
 XXXVII. 57 cvii. 29, 246 
 
 Llll. 52 CVIII. 61 
 
 iiv. 23 cix. 24 
 
 LIX. 282 ex. 316 
 
 i.x. 73 CXI. 128 
 
 LXVI. 222 CXII. 62, 281 
 
 Lxvii. 213 cxni. 63 
 
 LXVIII. 213 CXIV. 63 
 
 LXX. 57 cxv. 62 
 
 LXXIV. 27 CXVI. 63, 303 
 
 LXXVII. 28 CXVII. 56 
 
 Lxxviii. 32, 36 cxvin. 64 
 
 Lxxx. 37 cxix. 65 
 
 Lxxxii. 35 cxxi. 66-68 
 
 Lxxxiv. 241 cxxii. 68 
 
 Lxxxv. 34 cxxiii. 69 
 
 i.xxxvi. 33, 37 cxxiv. 373-4 
 
 Lxxxvii. 43 cxxv. 19, 70, 375 
 
 LXXXIX. 24 CXXVII. 72 
 
 xc. 44 cxxxii. 293, 367 
 xci. 58 cxxxv. 53 
 
 XCIV. 212 CXXXVI. 20 
 
 XCV. 23 CXLIV. 57 
 
 XCVII. 28 CXLVI. 275, 308 
 
 XCVIII. 29 CXLVIII. 190 
 
 XCIX. 58 CLII. 376 
 
 Southampton, Earl of (Henry Wriothes- 
 ley], as Antonio, 90-92, loi, 107- 
 
 115, 119-122; Shakespeare's patron, 
 I15-118, 155; collaborator, 124, 
 208 se^. ; author of fVillobie his 
 Avisa, 182 seq. ; his quarrel with 
 Shakespeare, 249 seq.; his politics, 109- 
 112, 242, 246-8; his poetic gifts, 
 181 ; as Dumaine, 49, 115, 230 mUi 
 as Mercutio, 233 ; as Demetrius, 
 223 ; as Bertram, 260-65 ; as 
 Oliver, 267, 27 1 ; as Drayton's " great 
 Olcon," 255; author of "Widow 
 Dido," 204 ; " king of shreds and 
 patches," 253 ; his false locks in 
 Sonnets, 212 ; in ' Merchant of 
 Venice," 218 
 Southampton, Countess of (Elizabeth 
 Vernon), as Helena, 223, 260 - 64 ; 
 her letter about "Sir J. FalstafF," 
 
 253 
 Southampton, Countess-Dowager of, 200 
 Spedding, James, on * Henry VIII.,' 67 ; 
 
 on the Philautia device, 97 note 
 Spenser, Edmund, made Poet Laureate, 
 
 38 ; reference to his death in the 
 
 Sonnets, 27 ; and in ' M.N.D.,' 221 
 Steevens, George, on Shakespeare as 
 
 Orlando, 268 
 Stephano, meant for Ben Jonson, 
 
 277-85 
 Stonehenge, lines on, by Daniel, re- 
 ferred to, 36 
 Strumbo, Signior, in Locrine^ a caricature 
 
 of Barnes by Shakespeare, 147 
 Suicide in S. Ixxiv., 27 ; in ' Hamlet ' and 
 
 ' K. Lear,' 443 
 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, on 
 
 authorship of the ' Hen. VI.' plays, 
 
 130-31; on 'Richard II.,' 244-5; 
 
 on 'Tro. and Cres.,' 314; on song in 
 
 ' Meas. for Meas.,' 367 note 
 Sycorax, allegory of, 293, 295, 298- 
 
 305 
 
 ' Taming of a Shrew,' authorship of the 
 
 old play, 142 
 ' Taming of the Shrew,' change in, to 
 
 " St. Luke's," from the pagan Temple, 
 
 355 
 Tarleton, Richard, clown, in the part of 
 Derick, 237 ; the original of Yorick, 
 
 444 
 'Tempest, The,' real persons in, 79- 
 
 IZ2, 272-88 ; allegories of, 289-309 
 Temple House, the original of the 
 
 moated grange at St. Luke's, 6-7, 
 
 354, 363. 369 
 Tennyson, Alfred, on 'Edward III.,' 210; 
 
 his "Mariana," 356 
 Thersites meant for Marston, 324-6 
 
 454 
 
INDEX 
 
 Thynne, Francis, original of Slender, 
 
 214 note^ 306 
 Tieck, Ludwig, on Ophelia, 4.ZI, 439 
 Tom of Bedlam in ' King Lear,' his 
 
 antecedents those of Tom K.yd, 136-9 
 Trinculo, origin of the name, 86, 274-5; 
 
 meant for John Maraton, 273 
 'Troilus and Cressida,' Mr. Swinburne 
 
 on, 314; design of, 315, 319; the 
 
 preface to, 315 ; history of, 317 ; real 
 
 persons in, 323-50 
 ' Twelfth Night,' real persons in, 270 ; 
 
 29 1 note ,' meaning of its production at 
 
 the Middle Temple, 291 note 
 ' Two Gentlemen of Verona,' real 
 
 persons in, 26, 52, 351-2 
 Tyler, Thomas, on Shakespeare's Sonnets, 
 
 2 ; identifies the Dark Lady, 4, 45, 57 
 
 Valentine, in ' T. G. of Ver.,' meant for 
 
 Shakespeare, 52, 443 
 Ventriloquism in 'The Tempest,' 86, 
 
 274 
 Vernon, Elizabeth, original of Helena, 
 
 223, 259 
 
 Webster, Thomas, on his fellow-play- 
 wrights, 447 
 
 Whetstone, George, his old play used 
 for 'Meas. for Meas.,' 357-8, 387 
 
 Willobie his Aviia, account of, 183-4 j 
 introduces W. S. as author's friend, 
 185 ; Southampton the author of, 
 186, 198, 202 ; real places and persons 
 identified in, 191-204 
 
 Wilton, the Helicon of Avisa, 194, 203 
 
 Winchester, a locality in Avisa, 197 ; 
 the Round Table at, 74 
 
 Wright, W. Aldis, on collaboration in 
 'Macbeth,' 179; on revision of 
 'Mer. of Ven.,' 218; on text of 
 'Henry V.,' 235; on style of Richard 
 II., Z44 
 
 Wyndham, George, on typography of 
 the Sonnets, 19 ; on a date in the 
 Sonnets, 29 
 
 Yate, Avis, of Basingstoke, 199 ; Mr. 
 
 and Mrs,, 200 
 Yorick, a reminiscence of Tarleton, 
 
 444 
 
 THE END