oHf -^''^■•'.^(LVWS-^* ^i'V-***^ iitJDsOM * -'-• _'.»•»» THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE GIFT OF Mrs. Helen rianney -' nc^K I \ SHAKESPEARE'S HISTORY OF KING JOHN. INTRODUCTION, AND NOTES EXPLANATORY AND CRITICAL. FOU USE IN SCHOOLS AND FAMILIES. Rev. henry N. HUDSON, LL.D. BOSTON: rUllLISIlKD I'.Y GINN & COMPANY. 1888. Enforcd according to Act of Congress, in the year 1880, by Henry N. Hudson, in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. J. S. CisHiNC & Co.. Printers, Boston. TO TEACHERS. HOW TO USE SHAKESPEARE IN SCHOOL. A^ S I have long been in frequent receipt of letters asking for advice or suggestions as to the best way of using Shakespeare in class, I have concluded to write out and print some of my thoughts on that subject. On one or two previous occasions, I have indeed moved the theme, but only, for the most part, incidentally, and in subordinate con- nection with other topics, never with any thing like a round Q * and full exposition of it. And in the first place I am to remark, that in such a mat- M ter no one can make uj) or describe, in detail, a method of Q\ teaching for another : in many points every teacher must ^ strike out his or her own method : for a method that works "i very well in one person's hands may nevertheless fail entirely in another's. Some general reasons or principles of method, >^ together with a few practical liints of detail, is about all that z. I can undertake to give ; this too rather with a view to setting ; teachers' own minds at work in devising ways, than to mark- J ing out any formal course of procedure. * In the second place, here, as elsewhere, the method of 1 teaching is to be shaped and suited to the i)articular purpose in hand ; on the general principle, of course, that the end is to point out and prescribe the means. So, if the purpose iii iV TO TEACHERS. be to make the pupils in our public schools Shakespcarians in any proper sense of the term, I can mark out no i)racli- cable method for the case, because I hold the purpose itself to be utterly impracticable ; one that cannot possibly be carried out, and ought not to be, if it could. I find divers people talking and writing as if our boys and girls were to make a knowledge of Shakespeare the chief business of their life, and were to gain their living thereby. These have a sort of cant phrase current among them, about " knowing Shakespeare in an eminent sense " ; and they are instructing us that, in order to this, we must study the English language historically, and acquire a technical mastery of Elizabethan idioms. Now, to know Shakespeare in an eminent sense, if it means any thing, must mean, I take it, to become Shakespearians, or become eminent in the knowledge of Shakespeare ; that is to say, we must have such a knowledge of Shakespeare as can be gained only by making a special and continuous, or at least very frequent, study of him through many long years. So the people in question seem intent upon some j)lan or program of teaching whereby the pupils in our schools shall come out full-grown Shakespearians ; this too when half-a-dozen, or perhaps a dozen, of the Poet's plays is all they can possibly find time for studying through. And to this end, they would have them study the Poet's language historically, and so draw out largely into his social, moral, and mental surroundings, and ransack the literature of his time ; therewithal they would have their Shakespeare Gram- mars and Shakespeare Lexicofis, and all the apparatus for training the pupils in a sort of learned verbalism, and in analyzing and parsing the Poet's sentences. Now I know of but three persons in the whole United HOW TO USE SHAKESPEARE IX SCHOOL. V States who have any just claim to be called Shakespearians, or who can be truly said to know Shakespeare in an eminent sense. Those are, of course, Mr. Grant White, Mr. Howard Fumess, and Mr. Joseph Crosby. Beyond this goodly trio, I cannot name a single person in the land who is able to go alone, or even to stand alone, in any question of textual criticism or textual correction. For that is what it is to be a Shakespearian. And these three have become Shake-- spearians, not by the help of any labour-saving machinery, such as special grammars and lexicons, but by spending many years of close study and hard brain-work in and around theif author. Before reaching that point, they have ngt only had to study all through the Poet himself, and this a great many times, but also to make many excursions and sojournings in the popular, and even the erudite aulhorshij) of his period. And the work has been almost, if not altogether, a pure labour of love with them. They have pursued it with im- passioned earnestness, as if they could find no rest for their souls without it. Well, and what do you suppose the result of all this has done or is doing for them in the way of making a living? Do you suppose they can begin to purchase their bread and butter, or even so much as the bread without the butter, with the proceeds of their great learning and accomplishments in that kind ? No, not a bit of it ! For the necessaries of life, every man of them has to depend mostly, if not entirely, on other means. If they had nothing to feed upon but what their Shakesjjcare knowledge brings them, they would have mighty little use for their teeth. If you do not believe this, ask the men themselves : and if they tell you it is not so, then I will frankly own myself a naughty boy, and will do penance publicly for my naughtiness. For my own poor VI TO TEACHERS. ]iart, I know right well that I have no claim to be called a Shakespearian, albeit I may, i)erchance, have had some fool- ish aspirations that way. Nevertheless I will venture to say that Shakespeare work does more towards procuring a liveli- hood for me than for either of the gentlemen named. This is doubtless because I am far inferior to them in Shake- spearian acquirement and culture. Yet, if I had nothing but the returns of my labour in that kind to live upon, I should have to live a good deal more cheaply than I do. And there would probably be no difficulty in finding persons that were not born till some time after my study of Shakespeare began, who, notwithstanding, can now outbid me altogether in any auction of bread-buying ]:)opularity. This, no doubt, is be- cause their natural gifts and fitness for the business are so superior to mine, that they might readily be extemporized into what no length of time and study could possibly educate me. In all this the three gentlemen aforesaid are, I presume, far from thinking they have any thing to complain of, or from having any disposition to complain ; and I am certainly as far from this as they are. It is all in course, and all just right, except that I have a good deal better than I deserve. And both they and I know very well that nothing but a love of the thing can carry any one through such a work ; that in the nature of things such pursuits have to be their own re- ward ; and that here, as elsewhere, " love's not love when it is mingled with regards that stand aloof from th' entire point." Such, then, is the course and process by which, and by which alone, men can come to know Shakespeare in any sense deserving to be called eminent. It is a process of close, continuous, life-long study. And, in order to know HOW TO USE SHAKESPEARE IN SCHOOL. Vll the Poet in this eminent sense, one must know a good deal more of him tlian of any thing else ; that is to say, the pur- suit must be something of a specialty with him ; unless his mind be by nature far more encyclopedic than most men's are. Then too, in the case of those who have reached this point, the process had its beginning in a deep and strong love of the subject : Shakespeare has been a passion with them, perhaps I should say the master-passion of their life : this was both the initiative impulse that set them a-going, and also the sustaining force that kept them going, in the work. Now such a love can hardly be wooed into life or made to sprout by a technical, parsing, gerund-grinding course of study. The proper genesis and growth of love are not apt to proceed in that way. A long and loving study may indeed produce, or go to seed in, a gi-ammar or a lexicon ; but surely the grammar or the lexicon is not the thing to prompt or inaugurate the long and loving study. Or, if the study begin in that way, it will not be a study of the workmanshij) as poetry, but only, or chiefly, as the raw- material of lingual science ; that is to say, as a subject for verbal dissection and surgery. If, then, any teacher would have his pupils go forth from school knowing Shakespeare in an eminent sense, he must shajje and order his methods accordingly. What those methods may be, or should be, I cannot say ; but I sliould think they must be (juite in the high-i)ressure line, and I more than suspect they will prove abortive, after all. And here I cannot forbear to remark that some few of us are so stuck in old-fogyism, or so ff>ssilized, as to hold that the main business of people in this world is to gain an honest living ; and tluil they ought l(; be educated with a con- stant eye to that purpose. These, to be sure, look very like Vm TO TEACHERS. self-evident propositions ; axioms, or mere truisms, wliich, nevertlielcss, our education seems determined to ignore entirely, and a due application of wliich would totally revo- lutionize our whole educational system. Now knowing Shakespeare in an eminent sense docs not appear to be exactly the thing for gaining an honest living. All people but a few, a very few indeed, have, ought to have, must have, other things to do. I suspect that one Shakespearian in about five millions is enough. And a vast majority are to get their living by hand-work, not by head- work ; and even witli those wiio li\c by head-work Shake- speare can very seldom be a leading interest. He can nowise be the substance or body of their mental food, but only, at the most, as a grateful seasoning thereof. Thinking of his poetry may be a pleasant and helpful companion for them in their business, but cannot be the business itself. His divine voice may be a sweetening tone, yet can be but a single tone, and an undertone at that, in the chorus of a well-ordered life and a daily round of honourable toil. Of the students in our colleges not one in a thousand, of the pupils in our high schools not one in a hundred thousand, can think, or ought to think, of becoming Shake.spearians. But most of them, it may be hoped, can become men and women of right intellectual tastes and loves, and so be capable of a pure and elevating pleasure in the converse of books. Surely, then, in the little time that can be found for studying Shakespeare, the teaching should be shaped to the end, not of making the i)upils Shakespearians, but only of doing somewhat — it cannot be much — towards making them wiser, better, hap- pier men and women. So, in reference to school study, what is the use of this cant about knowing Shakespeare in an eminent sense ? Why HOW TO USE SHAKESPEARE IN SCHOOL. IX talk of doing what no sane person can ever, for a moment, possibly think of attempting? The thing might well be passed by as one of the silliest cants that ever were canted, but that, as now often urged, it is of a very misleading and mis- chievous tendency ; like that other common folly of telling all our boys that they may become President of the United States. This is the plain and simple truth of the matter, and as such I am for speaking it without any sort of mincing or disguise. In ray vocabulary, indeed, on most occasions I choose that a spade be simply "a spade," and not "an instrument for removing earth." This brings me to the main point, to what may be called the heart of my message. Since any thing worthy to be termed an eminent knowledge of Shakespeare cannot possi- bly be gained or given in school, and could not be, even if ten times as many hours were spent in the study as can be, Drought to be, so spent, the question comes next. What, then, can be done ? And my answer, in the fewest words, is this : The most and the best that we can hope to do, is to plant in the pupils, and to nurse up as for as may be, a genuine taste and love for Shakespeare's poetry. The planting and nursing of this taste is purely a matter of c:ulture, and not of acquirement : it is not properly giving the pupils knowledge ; it is but opening the road, and starting them on the way to knowledge. .And such a taste, once well set in the mind, will be, or at least stand a good chance of being, an abiding principle, a prolific germ of wholesome and improving study : moreover it will naturally proceed till, in time, it comes to act as a strong elective instinct, causing the mind to gravitate towards what is good, and to recoil from what is bad : it may end in bringing, say, one in two millions to "know Shakespeare in an eminent sense" ; but it can hardly X TO TEACHERS. fail to be a precious and fruitful gain to many, perhaps to most, possibly to all. This I believe to be a thoroughly practicable aim. And as the aim itself is practicable, so there are practicable ways for attaining it or working towards it. What these ways are or may be, I can best set forth by tracing, as literally and distinctly as I know how, my own course of procedure in teaching. In tlie first place, I never have had, never will have, any recitations whatever ; but only what I call, simply, exercises, the pupils reading the author under my direction, correction, and explanation ; the teacher and the taught thus commun- ing together in the author's pages for the time being. Nor do I ever require, though I commonly advise, that the matter to be read in class be read over by the pupils in pri- vate before coming to the exercise. Such preparation is indeed well, but not necessary. I am very well satisfied by having the pupils live, breathe, think, feel with the author while his words are on their lips and in their ears. As I wish to have them simply growing, or getting the food of growth, I do not care to have them making any conscious accjuirement at all ; my aim thus always being to produce the utmost possible amount of silent effect. And I much prefer to have the classes rather small, never including more than twenty pupils ; even a somewhat smaller number is still better. Then, in Shakespeare, I always have the pupils read dramatically right round and round the class, myself calling the parts. When a speech is read, if the occasion seems to call for it, I make comments, ask ([uestions, or have the pupils ask them, so as to be sure thai they understand fairly what they are reading. That done, I call the next speech ; and SQ the reading and the talking proceed till the class-time is up. HOW TO USE SHAKESPEARE IN SCHOOL. XI In the second place, as to the nature and scope of these exercises, or the parts, elements, particulars they consist of.— In Shakespeare, the exercise is a mixed one of reading, language, and character. And 1 make a good deal of hav- ing the Poet's lines read properly ; this too both for the util- ity of it and as a choice and refined accomplishment, and also because such a reading of them greatly enhances the pleasure of the exercise both to the readers themselves and to the hearers. Here, of course, such points come in as the right pronunciation of words, the right place and degi-ee of emphasis, the right pauses and divisions of sense, the right tones and inflections of voice. But the particulars that make up good reading are too well known to need dwelling upon. Suffice it to say, that in this part of the exercise my whole care is to have the pupils understand what they are read- ing, and to pronounce it so that an intelligent listener may understand it : that done, I rest content. But I tolerate nothing theatrical or declamatory or oratorical or put on for effect in the style of reading, and insist on a clean, clear, sim- ple, quiet voicing of the sense and meaning ; no strut, no swell, but all plain and pure; that being my notion oi tas/e- ful reading. Touching this pcjint, I will but add that Shakespeare is both the easiest and also the hardest of all authors to read properly, — the easiest because he is tlic ino.it natural, and the hardest for the same reason ; and for boih these reasons together he is the best of all authors for training people in the art of reading : for an art it is, and a very high one too, insomuch that jnire and ]jerfect reading is one of the rarest things in the world, as it is also one of the delightfullest. The best description of what it is that now occurs to me is in Guy Manncrins, chapter 29th, where Julia Mannering writes Xll TO TEACHERS. to her friend how, of an evening, lier father is wont to sweeten their home and its fireside by the choice matter and the taste- ful manner of his reading. And so my happy life — for it is a happy one — has little of better happiness in it tlian hearing my own beloved pupils read Shakespeare. As to the language part of the exercise, this is chiefly con- cerned with the meaning and force of the Poet's words, but also enters more or less into sundry points of grammar, word- growth, prosody, and rhetoric, making the whole as little technical as possible. And I use, or aim to use, all this for the one sole purpose of getting the pupils to understand what is immediately before them ; not looking at all to any lingual or philological purposes lying beyond the matter directly in hand. And here I take the utmost care not to push the part of verbal comment and explanation so long or so far as to become dull and tedious to the pupils. For as I wish them to study Shakespeare, simply that they may learn to understand and to love his poetry itself, so I must and will have them take pleasure in the process ; and people are not apt to fall or to grow in love with things that bore them. I would much rather they should not fully understand his thought, or not take in the full sense of his lines, than that they should feel any thing of weariness or disgust in the study ; for the defect of present comprehension can easily be repaired in the future, but not so the disgust. If they really love the poetry, and find it pleasant to their souls, I'll risk the rest. In truth, average pupils do not need nearly so much of cate- chizing and explaining as many teachers are apt to suppose. I have known divers cases where this process was carried to a very inordinate and hurtful excess, the matter being all chopped into a fine mince-meat of items ; questions and top- ics being multiplied to the last degree of minuteness and HOW TO USE SHAKESPEARE IN SCHOOL. XUl tenuity. Often well-nigh a hundred questions are pressed where there ought not to be more than one or two ; the aim being, apparently, to force an exhatistive grammatical study of the matter. And exhaustive of the pupil's interest and patience it may well prove to be. This is not studying Shake- speare, but merely using him as an occasion for studying something else. Surely, surely, such a course " is not, nor it cannot come to, good" : it is just the way to make pupils loathe the study as an intolerable bore, and wish the Poet had never been born. The thing to be aimed at before all others is, to draw and hold the pupil's mind in immediate contact with the poetry ; and such a multitude of mincing questions and comments is just a thick wedge of tiresome obstruction and separation driven in between the two. In my own teaching, my greatest fear commonly is, lest I may strangle and squelch the proper virtue and efficacy of the Poet's lines with my own incontinent catechetical and exeget- ical babble. Next, for the character part of the exercise. And here I have to say, at the start, that I cannot think it a good use of time to put pupils to the study of Shakespeare at all, until they have got strength and ripeness of mind enough to enter, at lea.st in some fair measure, into the transpirations of char- acter in his persons. For this is indeed the Shakespeare of Shakespeare. And the process is as far as you can think from being a mere formal or mechanical or routine hantlling of words and i)hrascs and figures of speech : it is nothing less than to hear and to see the hearts and souls of the persons in what they say and do ; to feel, as it were, liie very pulse-throbs of their inner life. Herein it is that Shakespeare's unapproached jimI uuaproachable mastery of human nature lies. Nor can I bear to have his poetry XIV TO TEACHERS, Studied merely as a curious thing standing outside of and apart from the common Vife of man, but as drawing cUrectly into the living current of human interests, feelings, duties, needs, occasions. So I like to be often running the Poet's thoughts, and carrying the pupils with them, right out and home to the business and bosom of humanity about them ; into the follies, vices, and virtues, the meannesses and nobil- ities, the loves, joys, sorrows, and shames, the lapses and grandeurs, the disciplines, disasters, devotions, and divinities, of men and women as they really are in the world. For so the right use of his poetry is, to subserve the ends of life, not of talk. And if this part be rightly done, pupils will soon learn that "our gentle Shakespeare" is not a prodigious enchanter playing with sublime or grotescjue imaginations for their amusement, but a friend and brother, all alive with the same heart that is in them ; and who, while he is but little less than an angel, is also at the same time but little more than themselves ; so that, beginning where his feet are, they can gradually rise, and keep rising, till they come to be at home where his great, deep, mighty intellect is. Such, substantially, and in some detail, is the course I have uniformly pursued in my Shakespeare classes. I have never cared to have my pupils make any show in analyzing and parsing the Poet's language, but I have cared much, very much, to have them understand and enjoy his poetry. Accordingly I have never touched the former at all, except so far as was clearly needful in order to secure the latter. And as the poetry was made for the purpose of being en- joyed, so, when I have seen the pupils enjoying it, this has been to me sufficient proof that they rightly understood it. True, I have never had, nor have I ever wanted, any availa- ble but cheap percentages of proficiency to set off my work : HOW TO USE SHAKESPEARE IN SCHOOL. XV perhaps my pupils have seldom had any idea of what they were getting from the study. Very well ; then it has at least not fostered conceit in them : so I wished to have it, so was glad to have it : the results I aimed at were far off in the future ; nor have I had any fear of those results failing to emerge in due time. In fact, I cleave rather fondly to the hope of being remembered by my pupils with some affection after I shall be no more ; and I know right well tliat the best fruits of the best mental planting have and must have a pretty long interval between the seed-time and the harvest. Once, indeed, and it was my very first attempt, having a class of highly intelligent young ladies, I undertook to put them through a pretty severe drill in prosody : after endur- ing it awhile, they remonstrated with me, giving me to understand that they wanted the light and pleasure properly belonging to the study, and not the tediousness that ped- , antry or mere technical learning could force into it. They were right ; and herein I jtrobably learnt more from them than they ditl from me. And so teaching of Shakespeare has been just the hai^jjiest occupation of my life : the whole- somest and most tonic too ; disi)osing me more than any other to severe and earnest thought : no drudgery in it, no dullness about it ; but " as full of spirit as the month of May," and joyous as Wordsworth's lark hiding himself in the light of morning, and With a soul as strong as a mountain river Pouring out praise to the almighty Giver. But now certain wise ones are telling us that this is all wrong ; that teaching Shakespeare in this way is making, or tending to make, the study "an entertainment," ami so not the " noble study " that it ought to be ; meaning, I iiui)pose; Xvi TO TE.\CIIERS. by nohic sfi/dy, such a study as would bring the jjupils to know Shakespeare in the eminent sense remarked upon before. What is this but to proceed in the work just as if the pupils were to become Shakespearians ; that is, special- ists in that particular line ? Thus they would import into this study the same false and vicious mode that has come to be used with the classics in our colleges. This mode is, to keep j)egging away continu- ally at points of grammar and etymology, so as to leave no time or thought for the sense and meaning of what is read. Thus the classical author is used merely or mainly for the purpose of teaching the grammar, not the grammar for the purpose of understanding the author. For the practical upshot of such a course is, to have the student learn what modern linguists and grammarians have compiled, not what the old Greeks and Romans thought. This hind-fust or hindmost-foremost process has grown to be a dreadful nui- , sance in our practice, making the study of Greek and Latin inexpressibly lifeless and wearisome ; and utterly fruitless withal as regards real growth of mind and culture of taste. Some years ago, I had a talk on this subject with our late venerable patriarch of American letters, whose only grandson had then recently graduated from college. He told me he had gathered from the young man to what a wasteful and vicious extreme the thing was carried ; and he spoke in terms of severe censure and reprobation of the custom. And so I have heard how a very learned professor one day spent the time of a whole recitation in talking about a comma that had been inserted in a Greek text ; telling the class who inserted it, and when and why he did so ; also who had since accepted it, and who had since rejected it, and when and why ; also what effect the insertion had, and what the HOW TO USE SHAKESPEARE IN SCHOOL. XVll omission, on the sense of the passage. Now, if the students had all been predestined or predetermined specialists in Greek, this might possibly have been the right way ; but, as they were not so predestined or predetermined, the way was most certainly wTong, and a worse one could hardly have been taken. For the right course of study for those who are to be specialists in tliis or that pursuit is one thing ; tlte right course for those wiio cannot be, and have no thought of being, specialists is a very different thing ; and to transfer the former course to the latter class, is a most preposterous blunder, yes, and a most mischievous one too. I have lately been given to understand that some of our best classical teachers have become sensible of this great error, and have set to work to correct it in practice. I understand also that noble old Harvard, wise in this, as in many other things, is leading the return to the older and better way. I hope most devoutly that it is so ; for the proper effect of the modern way can hardly be any other than to attenuate and chill and dwarf the student's better facul- ties. The thing, to be sure, has been done in the name of thoroughness ; but I believe it has proved thorough to no end but that of unsinewing the mind, and drying the sap out of it. But now the self-same false mode that has thus run itself into the ground in classical study must, it seems, be used in the study of ICnglish authors. I'or so the wise ones afore- said, those who are for having everybody know Siiakespeare in an eminent sense, would, ap])arer.tly, have the study en- nobled by continual diversions into the science of language, exercising the pupil's logical faculty, or rather his memory, with points of etymology, grammar, historical usage, &c. ; points that are, ur may be made to ajjpear, scientifically .will TO TEACHERS. demonstrable. Tlius the thing they seem to have in view is about the same that certain positivist tliinkers mean, when they would persuade us that no knowledge is really worth having but what stands on a basis of scientific demonstration, so that we not only may be certain of its truth, but cannot possibly be otherwise. So I have somewhere read of a certain mathematician who, on reading Paradise Lost, made this profound criticism, that " it was a very pretty piece of work, but he did not see that it proved any thing." But, if he had studied it in the modern way of studying poetry, he would have found that divers things might be proved from it ; as, for instance, thav, a metajihor and a simile are at bottom one and the same thing, differing only in form, and that the author very seldom, if ever, makes use of the word its. And so the singing of a bird does not prove any thing scientifically ; and your best way of getting scientific knowledge about the little creature is by dissecting him, so as to find out where the music comes from, and how it is made. And so, again, w'hat good can the flowers growing on your mother's grave do you, unless you use them as things to " peep and botanize " about, like the "philosopher" in one of Wordsworth's poems? The study of Shakespeare an entertainment? Yes, to be sure, precisely that, if you please to call it so ; a pastime, a recreation, a delight. This is just what, in my notion of things, such a study ought to be. Why, what else should it be ? It is just what I have always tried my utmost, and t trust I may say with some little success, to make the study. Shakespeare's poetry, has it not a right to be to us a peren- nial spring of sweetness and refreshment, a thing Round which, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood Our pastime and our happiness may grow ? HOW TO USE SHAKESPEARE IN SCHOOL. XlX And so my supreme desire has been that the time spent in the study should be, to the pupils, brimful of quiet gladness and pleasantness ; and in so far as at any time it has not been so, just so far I have regarded my work as a sorry failure, and have determined to try and do better next time. What the dickens — I beg everybody's pardon — what can be the proper use of studying Shakespeare's poetry without enjoyment? Or do you suppose that any one can really delight in his poetry, without reaping therefrom the highest and purest benefit ? The delectation is itself the appropriate earnest and proof that the student is drinking in — without knowing it indeed, and all the better for that — just the truest, deepest, finest culture that any poetry can give. What touches the mind's heart is apt to cause pleasure ; what merely grubs in its outskirts and suburbs is apt to be tedious and dull. .Assuredly, therefore, if a teacher finds that his or her pupils, or any of them, catmot be wooed and won to take pleasure in the study of Shakespeare, then either the teacher should forthwith go to teaching something else, or the pupils should be put to some other study. \Vhat wise and wonderful ideas our progressive oblivion of the past is putting into people's heads ! Why, it has been, from time immemorial, a settled axiom, that the proper aim of poetry is to please, of the highest poetry, to make wisdom and virtue j^leasant, to crown the True and the Good with delight and joy. This is the very constituent of the poet's art ; that without which it has no adequate reason for l)eing. To clothe the austere forms of truth and wisdom with heart-taking beauty and sweetness, is its life and law. I>ut then it is only when poetry is read as poetry that it is bound to please. WJien or .so far as it is studied only as grammar or logic, it has a perfect right to be uni)leasant- xx TO teach?:rs. Of course I hold that poetry, especially Shakespeare's, ought to be read as i)oetry ; and when it is not read with pleasure, the right grace and profit of the reading are missed. For the proper instructiveness of poetry is essentially dependant on its pleasantness ; whereas in other forms of writing this order is or may be reversed. The sense or the conscience of what is morally good and right should indeed have a hand, and a prerogative hand, in shaping our pleasures ; and so, to be sure, it must be, else the pleasures will needs be tran- sient, and even the seed-time of future pains. So right- minded people ought to desire, and do desire, to find pleasure in what is right and good ; the highest pleasure in what is Tightest ant! best : nevertheless the pleasure of the thing is what puts its healing, purifying, regenerating virtue into act ; and to converse with what is in itself beautiful and good without tasting any pleasantness in it, is or may be a positive harm. But, indeed, our education has totally lost the idea of cul- ture, and consequently has thrown aside the proper methods of it : it makes no account of any thing but acquirement. And the reason seems to be somewhat as follows: — The process of culture is silent and unconscious, because it works deep in the mind ; the process of acquirement is conscious and loud, because its work is all on the mind's surface. Moreover the former is exceedingly slow, insomuch as to yield from day to day no audible results, and so cannot be made available for effect in recitation : the latter is rapid, yielding recitable results from hour to hour ; the effect comes quickly, is quickly told in recitation, and makes a splendid appearance, thus tickling the vanity of inipils mightily, as also of their loving (self-loving?) parents. But then, on the other hand, the culture that you have HOW TO USE SHAKESPEARE TN SCHOOL. XXl once got you thenceforward keep, and can nowise part with or lose it ; slow in coming, it comes to stay with you, and to be an indelible part of you : whereas your acquirement is, for the most j)art, quickly got, and as quickly lost ; for, in- deed, it makes no part of the mind, but merely hangs or sticks on its outside. So, here, the pupil just crams in study, disgorges in recitation, and then forgets it all, to go through another like round of cramming, disgorging, and forgetting. Thus the pulse of your acquirement is easily counted, and foots up superbly from day to day ; but nobody can count the pulse of your culture, for it has none, at least none that is or can be perceived. In other words, the course of cul- ture is dimly marked by years ; that of acquirement is plainly marked by hours. And so no one can parse, or cares to parse, the delight he has in Shakespeare, for the parsing just kills the delight : the culture one gets from studying his poetry as poetry, he can nowise recite, for it is not a recitable thing, and he can tell you nothing about it : he can only say he loves the poetry, and that talking with it somehow recreates and refreshes him. liut any one can easily learn to parse the Poet's words : what he gets from studying his poetry as grammar, or logic, or rhetoric, or prosody, this he can recite, can talk glibly about it ; but it stirs no love in him, has no recreation or refresh- ment for him at all ; none, that is, unless by touching his van- ity, and putting him in love with himself for the pretty siiow he makes in recitation. There is, to be sure, a way of hand- ling the study of Shakespeare, whereby the jnipils may be led to take pleasure not so much in his poetry itself as in their own supposed knowledge and a])prcciation of it. I hat way, however, I just do not believe in at all ; no ! not even though it be the right way for bringing pupils to know Shakesi)earc XXll TO TEACHERS. in the eminent sense. I have myself learnt him, if I may claim to know him at all, in a very uneminent sense, and have for more than forty years been drawn onwards in the study purely by the natural pleasantness of his poetry ; and so 1 am content to have others do. Thus, you see, it has never been with me " a noble study " at all. Well now, our education is continually saying, in effect if not in words, " What is the use of pursuing such studies, or pursuing them in sucli a way, as can produce no available re- sults, nothing to show, from day to day? Put away your slow thing, whose course is but faintly marked even by years, and give us the spry thing, that marks its course brilliantly by days, perhaps by hours. Let the clock of our progress tick loudly, that we may always know just where it is, and just where we are. Except we can count the pulse of your process, we will not believe there is any life or virtue in it. None of your silences for us, if you please ! " A few words now on another, yet nearly connected, topic, and I have done. — I have long thought, and the thought has kept strengthening with me from year to year, that our educational work proceeds altogether too much by recita- tions. Our school routine is now a steady stream of these, so that teachers have no time for any thing else ; the pupils being thus held in a continual process of alternate crammings and disgorgings. As part and parcel of this recitation system, we must have frecjuent examinations and exhibitions, for a more emphatic marking of our progress. The thing has grown to the height of a monstrous abuse, and is threatening most serious consecjuences. It is a huge perpetual-motion of forcing and high-pressure ; no possible pains being spared to keep the pupils intensely conscious of their proficiency, or of their deficiency, as the case may be : motives of pride, HOW TO USE SHAKESPEARE IN SCHOOL. Xxiii vanity, shame, ambition, rivalry, emulation, are constantly appealed to and stimulated, and the nervous system kept boiling-hot with them. Thus, to make the love of knowl- edge sprout soon enough, and grow fast and strong enough for our ideas, we are all the while dosing and provoking it with a sort of mental and moral cantharides. Surely, the old arguments of the rod and the ferule, as persuasives to diligence, were far wholesomer, yes, and far kinder too, than this constant application of intellectual drugs and high- wines : the former only made the skin tingle and smart a little while, and that was tlie end of it ; whereas the latter plants its pains within the very house of life, and leaves them rankling and festering there. So our way is, to spare the skin and kill the heart. And, if the thing is not spoiling the boys, it is at all events killing the girls. For, as a general rule, girls are, I take it, more sensitive and excitable naturally than boys, and there- fore more liable to have their brain and nervous system fatally wronged and diseased by this dreadful, this cruel, fomenting with unnatural stimulants and provocatives. To be sure, it makes them preternaturally bright and interesting for a while, and we think the process is working gloriously : but this is all because the dear creatures have come to blossom at a time when as yet the leaves should not have put forth ; and so, when the proper time arrives for them to be in the full bloom of womanhood, leaf, blossom, and all are gone, leaving them faded and withered and joyless; and chronic ill health, premature old age, untimely death, are their lot and portion. Of course, the thing cannot fail to have the effect of devitalizing and demoralizing and dwarfing the mind itself. The bright glow in its cheeks is but the hectic flush of a comsumptivc state. XXIV TO TEACHERS, This is no fancy-picture, no tlreani of a speculative imagi- nation : it is only too true in matter of fact ; as any one may see, or rather as no one can choose but see, who uses his eyes upon what is going on about us. Why, Massachusetts cannot now build asylums fast enough for her multiplying insane ; and, if things keep on as they are now going, the chances are that the whole State will in no very long time come to be almost one continuous hospital of lunatics. All J.his proceeds naturally and in course from our restless and reckless insistance on forcing what is, after all, but a showy, barren, conceited intellectualism. But, indeed, the conse- quences of this thing are, some of them, too appalling to be so much as hinted here : I can but speak the word mother- hood, — a word even more laden with tender and sacred meaning than wovianhood. I have talked with a good many of our best teachers on this subject, never with any one who did not express a full concurrence with me in the opinion, that the recitation busi- ness is shockingly and ruinously overworked in our teaching. But they say they can do nothing, or at the best very little, to help it ; the public will have it so ; the thing has come to be a deep-seated chronic disease in our educational system : this disease has got to run its course and work itself through ; it is to be hoped that, when matters are at the worst, they will take a turn, and begin to mend : at all events, time alone can work out a redress of the wrong. In all this they are perfectly right ; so that the blame of the thing nowise rests with them. Neither does the blame rest ultimately with superintendents, supervisors, or committee-men, where Gail Hamilton, in her recent book, places it : the trouble lies further back, in the state of the public mind itself, which has for a long time been industriously, incessantly, systematically, HOW TO USE SHAKESPEARE IN SCHOOL. XXV pen-erted, corrupted, depraved, by plausible but shallow in- novators and quacks. 'i'he real truth is, things have come to that pass with us, that parents will not believe there is or can be any real growth of mind in their children, unless they can see them growing from day to day ; whereas a growing that can be so seen is of course just no growing at all, but only a bloating ; which I believe I have said somewhere before. In this wretched mispersuasion, they use all possible means to foster in their children a morbid habit of conscious acquirement ; and a system of recitations, examinations, and exhibitions to keep the process hot and steaming, is the thing to do it. But I more than suspect the primitive root of the diiificulty lies deeper still, and is just here : That, having grown into a secret disrelish of the old religion of our fathers, as being too objective in its nature, and too firm and solid in its objec- tiveness, to suit our taste, we have turned to an idolatry of intellect and knowledge ; have no faith in any thing, no love for any thing, but what we spin, or seem to spin, out of our own minds. So in the idolatry of intellect, as in other idol- atries, the marble statue with which it begins naturally comes, in i)rocess of time, to be put aside as too weighty, too ex- pensive, and too still, and to be replaced with a hollow and worthless image all made up of paper and paint. And the cheaper and falser the idol is, the more eagerly do the devotees cut and scourge themselves in the worship uf it. Hence the prating and pretentious intellectualism which we pursue with such suicidal eagerness. I must add, that of the same family with the cant spoken of before is tliat other canting phrase now so rife among us about "the higher education." The lower education, yes, the lower, is what we want ; and if this be duly cared for, XXVI TO TEACHERS, the higher may be safely left to take care of itself. The latter will then come, and so it ought to come, of its own accord, just as fast and as far as the former finds or develops the individual aptitude for it ; and the attempting to give it regardless of such aptitude can only do what it is now doing, namely, spoil a great many people for all useful hand-work, without fitting them for any sort of head-work. Of course there are some studies which may, perhaps must, proceed more or less by recitation. But, as a perpetual show of mind in the young is and can be nothing but a perpetual sham, so I am and long have been perfectly satisfied that at least three-fourths of our recitations ought to be abandoned with all practicable speed, and be replaced by the better methods of our fathers, — methods that hold fast to the old' law of what Dr. ^ViUiam B. Carpenter terms " unconscious cerebration," which is indeed the irrepealable law of all true mental growth and all right intellectual health. Nay, more ; the best results of the best thinking in the best and ripest heads come under the operation of the self-same law, — just that, and no other. Assuredly, therefore, the need now most urgently pressing upon us is, to have vastly more of growth, and vastly less of manufacture, in our education ; or, in other words, that the school be altogether more a garden, and altogether less a mill. And a garden, especially with the rich multitudinous flora of Shakespeare blooming and breathing in it, can it be, cught it to be, other than a pleasant and happy place ? ■The child whose love is here at least doth reap One precious gain, that he forgets himself. INTRODUCTION. Shakespeare as an Historian. SHAKESPEARE has probably done more to diffuse a knowledge of English history than all the historians put together ; our liveliest and best impressions of " merry England in the olden time " being generally drawn from his pages. Though we seldom think of referring to him as authority in matters of fact, yet we are apt to make him our standard of old English manners and character and life, reading other historians by his light, and trying them by his measures, without being distinctly conscious of it. It scarce need be said that the Poet's labours in this kind are as far as possible from being the unsouled political dia- grams of history : they are, in the right and full sense of the term, dramatic revivifications of the Past, wherein the shades of departed things are made to live their life over again, to repeat them.selves, as it were, under our eye ; so that they have an interest for us such as no mere narrative of events can possess. If there are any others able to give us as just notions, provided we read them, still there are none wlio come near him in the art of causing themselves to be read. And the further we push our historical researches, the more we are brought to recognize the substantial justness of his reijresentations. ICven when he makes free with chronology, and varies from the actual order of things, it is commonly in quest of something higher and better than chronological 4 KING JOHN. accuracy ; and the result is in most cases favourable to right conceptions ; the persons and events being thereby so knit together in a sort of vital harmony as to be better under- stood than if they were ordered with literal exactness of time and place. He never fails to hold the mind in natural inter- course and sympathy with living and operative truth. Kings and princes and the heads of the State, it is true, figure prominently in his scenes ; but this is done in such a way as to set us face to face with the real spirit and sense of the "f)eople, whose claims are never sacrificed, to make an im- posing pageant or puppet-show of political automatons. If he brings in fictitious persons and events, mixing them up with real ones, it is that he may set forth into view those parts and elements and aspects of life which lie without the range of common history ; enshrining in representative ideal forms the else neglected substance of actual character. But the most noteworthy point in this branch of the theme is, that out of the materials of an entire age and nation he so selects and uses a few as to give a just conception of the whole ; all the lines and features of its life and action, its piety, chivalry, wisdom, policy, wit, and profligacy, being gathered up and wrought out in fair proportion and clear ex- pression. Where he deviates most from all the authorities known to have been consulted by him, there is a large, wise propriety in his deviations, sucli as might well prompt the conjecture of his liaving written from some traditionary mat- ter which the historians had failed to chronicle. And indeed some of those deviations have been remarkably verified by the researches of latter times ; as if the Poet had exercised a sort of prophetic power in his dramatic retrospections. So that our latest study and ripest judgment in any historical matter handled by him will be apt to fall in with and confirm INTRODUCTION. 5 the impressions at first derived from him ; that which in the outset approved itself to the imagination as beautiful, in the end approving itself to the judgment as true. These remarks, however, must not be taken as in dispar- agement of other forms of history. It is important for us to know much which it was not the Poet's business to teach, and which if he had attempted to teach, we should probably learn far less from him. Nor can we be too much on our guard against resting in those vague general notions of the Past which are so often found ministering to conceit and flippant shallowness. For, in truth, however we may exult in the free soarings of the spirit beyond the bounds of time and sense, one foot of the solid ground of Facts, where our thoughts must needs be limited by the matter that feeds them, is worth far more than acres upon acres of cloud-land glory where, as there is nothing to bound the sight, because nothing to be seen, so a man may easily credit himself with "gazing into the abysses of the infinite." And perhaps the best way to keep off all such conceit is liy holding the mind down to the specialties of local and particular truth. These specialties, however, it is not for poetry to supply ; nay, rather, it would cease to be jjoetry, sliould it go about to supply them. ;\nd it is enough that Shakespeare, in giving us wliat lay within the scope of his art, facilitates and furthers the learning of that which lies out of it ; working whatever mat- ter he takes into a lamp to light our way through that wlii( h he omits. This is indeed to make the Historical Drama what it shoul