A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

ST. GEORGE’S DAY, 1564

[Footnote: 1864.]

All England knows that this year (1864) is the three hundredth since Shakspere was born. The strong probability is likewise that this month of April is that in which he first saw the earthly light. On the twenty-sixth of April he was baptized. Whether he was born on the twenty-third, to which effect there may once have been a tradition, we do not know; but though there is nothing to corroborate that statement, there are two facts which would incline us to believe it if we could: the one that he died on the twenty-third of April, thus, as it were, completing a cycle; and the other that the twenty-third of April is St. George’s Day. If there is no harm in indulging in a little fanciful sentiment about such a grand fact, we should say that certainly it was St. George for merry England when Shakspere was born. But had St. George been the best saint in the calendar—which we have little enough ground for supposing he was—it would better suit our subject to say that the Highest was thinking of his England when he sent Shakspere into it, to be a strength, a wonder, and a gladness to the nations of his earth.

But if we write thus about Shakspere, influenced only by the fashion of the day, we shall be much in the condition of those fashionable architects who with their vain praises built the tombs of the prophets, while they had no regard to the lessons they taught. We hope to be able to show that we have good grounds for our rejoicing in the birth of that child whom after-years placed highest on the rocky steep of Art, up which so many of those who combine feeling and thought are always striving.

First, however, let us look at some of the more powerful of the influences into the midst of which he was born. For a child is born into the womb of the time, which indeed enclosed and fed him before he was born. Not the least subtle and potent of those influences which tend to the education of the child (in the true sense of the word education) are those which are brought to bear upon him through the mind, heart, judgement of his parents. We mean that those powers which have operated strongly upon them, have a certain concentrated operation, both antenatal and psychological, as well as educational and spiritual, upon the child. Now Shakspere was born in the sixth year of Queen Elizabeth. He was the eldest son, but the third child. His father and mother must have been married not later than the year 1557, two years after Cranmer was burned at the stake, one of the two hundred who thus perished in that time of pain, resulting in the firm establishment of a reformation which, like all other changes for the better, could not be verified and secured without some form or other of the trial by fire. Events such as then took place in every part of the country could not fail to make a strong impression upon all thinking people, especially as it was not those of high position only who were thus called upon to bear witness to their beliefs. John Shakspere and Mary Arden were in all likelihood themselves of the Protestant party; and although, as far as we know, they were never in any especial danger of being denounced, the whole of the circumstances must have tended to produce in them individually, what seems to have been characteristic of the age in which they lived, earnestness. In times such as those, people are compelled to think.

And here an interesting question occurs: Was it in part to his mother that Shakspere was indebted for that profound knowledge of the Bible which is so evident in his writings? A good many copies of the Scriptures must have been by this time, in one translation or another, scattered over the country. [Footnote: And it seems to us probable that this diffusion of the Bible, did more to rouse the slumbering literary power of England, than any influences of foreign literature whatever.] No doubt the word was precious in those days, and hard to buy; but there might have been a copy, notwithstanding, in the house of John Shakspere, and it is possible that it was from his mother’s lips that the boy first heard the Scripture tales. We have called his acquaintance with Scripture profound, and one peculiar way in which it manifests itself will bear out the assertion; for frequently it is the very spirit and essential aroma of the passage that he reproduces, without making any use of the words themselves. There are passages in his writings which we could not have understood but for some acquaintance with the New Testament. We will produce a few specimens of the kind we mean, confining ourselves to one play, “Macbeth.”

Just mentioning the phrase, “temple-haunting martlet” (act i. scene 6), as including in it a reference to the verse, “Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts,” we pass to the following passage, for which we do not believe there is any explanation but that suggested to us by the passage of Scripture to be cited.

Macbeth, on his way to murder Duncan, says,—

 
                  “Thou sure and firm-set earth,
  Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
  Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
  And take the present horror from the time
  Which now suits with it.”
 

What is meant by the last two lines? It seems to us to be just another form of the words, “For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the house-tops.” Of course we do not mean that Macbeth is represented as having this passage in his mind, but that Shakspere had the feeling of it when he wrote thus. What Macbeth means is, “Earth, do not hear me in the dark, which is suitable to the present horror, lest the very stones prate about it in the daylight, which is not suitable to such things; thus taking ‘the present horror from the time which now suits with it.’”

Again, in the only piece of humour in the play—if that should be called humour which, taken in its relation to the consciousness of the principal characters, is as terrible as anything in the piece—the porter ends off his fantastic soliloquy, in which he personates the porter of hell-gate, with the words, “But this place is too cold for hell: I’ll devil-porter it no further. I had thought to have let in some of all professions, that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.” Now what else had the writer in his mind but the verse from the Sermon on the Mount, “For wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat”?

It may be objected that such passages as these, being of the most commonly quoted, imply no profound acquaintance with Scripture, such as we have said Shakspere possessed. But no amount of knowledge of the words of the Bible would be sufficient to justify the use of the word profound. What is remarkable in the employment of these passages, is not merely that they are so present to his mind that they come up for use in the most exciting moments of composition, but that he embodies the spirit of them in such a new form as reveals to minds saturated and deadened with the sound of the words, the very visual image and spiritual meaning involved in them. “The primrose way!” And to what?

We will confine ourselves to one passage more:—

 
                              “Macbeth
  Is ripe for shaking, and the powers above
  Put on their instruments.”
 

In the end of the 14th chapter of the Revelation we have the words, “Thrust in thy sickle, and reap: for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe.” We suspect that Shakspere wrote, ripe to shaking.

The instances to which we have confined ourselves do not by any means belong to the most evident kind of proof that might be adduced of Shakspere’s acquaintance with Scripture. The subject, in its ordinary aspect, has been elsewhere treated with far more fulness than our design would permit us to indulge in, even if it had not been done already. Our object has been to bring forward a few passages which seem to us to breathe the very spirit of individual passages in sacred writ, without direct use of the words themselves; and, of course, in such a case we can only appeal to the (no doubt) very various degrees of conviction which they may rouse in the minds of our readers.

But there is one singular correspondence in another almost literal quotation from the Gospel, which is to us wonderfully interesting. We are told that the words “eye of a needle,” in the passage about a rich man entering the kingdom of heaven, mean the small side entrance in a city gate. Now, in “Richard II,” act v. scene 5, Richard quotes the passage thus:—

 
  “It is as hard to come as for a camel
  To thread the postern of a needle’s eye;”
 

showing that either the imagination of Shakspere suggested the real explanation, or he had taken pains to acquaint himself with the significance of the simile. We can hardly say that the correspondence might be merely fortuitous; because, at the least, Shakspere looked for and found a suitable figure to associate with the words eye of a needle, and so fell upon the real explanation; except, indeed, he had no particular significance in using the word that meant a little gate, instead of a word meaning any kind of entrance, which, with him, seems unlikely.

We have not by any means proven that Shakspere’s acquaintance with the Scriptures had an early date in his history; but certainly the Bible must have had a great influence upon him who was the highest representative mind of the time, its influence on the general development of the nation being unquestionable. This, therefore, seeing the Bible itself was just dawning full upon the country while Shakspere was becoming capable of understanding it, seems the suitable sequence in which to take notice of that influence, and of some of those passages in his works which testify to it.

But, besides the Bible, every nation has a Bible, or at least an Old Testament, in its own history; and that Shakspere paid especial attention to this, is no matter of conjecture. We suspect his mode of writing historical plays is more after the fashion of the Bible histories than that of most writers of history. Indeed, the development and consequences of character and conduct are clear to those that read his histories with open eyes. Now, in his childhood Shakspere may have had some special incentive to the study of history springing out of the fact that his mother’s grandfather had been “groom of the chamber to Henry VII.,” while there is sufficient testimony that a further removed ancestor of his father, as well, had stood high in the favour of the same monarch. Therefore the history of the troublous times of the preceding century, which were brought to a close by the usurpation of Henry VII., would naturally be a subject of talk in the quiet household, where books and amusements such as now occupy our boys, were scarce or wanting altogether. The proximity of such a past of strife and commotion, crowded with eventful change, must have formed a background full of the material of excitement to an age which lived in the midst of a peculiarly exciting history of its own.

Perhaps the chief intellectual characteristic of the age of Elizabeth was activity; this activity accounting even for much that is objectionable in its literature. Now this activity must have been growing in the people throughout the fifteenth century; the wars of the Roses, although they stifled literature, so that it had, as it were, to be born again in the beginning of the following century, being, after all, but as the “eager strife” of the shadow-leaves above the “genuine life” of the grass,—

 
         “And the mute repose
  Of sweetly breathing flowers.”
 

But when peace had fallen on the land, it would seem as if the impulse to action springing from strife still operated, as the waves will go on raving upon the shore after the wind has ceased, and found one outlet, amongst others, in literature, and peculiarly in dramatic literature. Peace, rendered yet more intense by the cessation of the cries of the tormentors, and the groans of the noble army of suffering martyrs, made, as it were, a kind of vacuum; and into that vacuum burst up the torrent-springs of a thousand souls—the thoughts that were no longer repressed—in the history of the past and the Utopian speculation on the future; in noble theology, capable statesmanship, and science at once brilliant and profound; in the voyage of discovery, and the change of the swan-like merchantman into a very fire-drake of war for the defence of the threatened shores; in the first brave speech of the Puritan in Elizabeth’s Parliament, the first murmurs of the voice of liberty, soon to thunder throughout the land; in the naturalizing of foreign genius by translation, and the invention, or at least adoption, of a new and transcendent rhythm; in the song, in the epic, in the drama.

So much for the general. Let us now, following the course of his life, recall, in a few sentences, some of the chief events which must have impressed the all-open mind of Shakspere in the earlier portion of his history.

Perhaps it would not be going back too far to begin with the Massacre of Paris, which took place when he was eight years old. It caused so much horror in England, that it is not absurd to suppose that some black rays from the deed of darkness may have fallen on the mind of such a child as Shakspere.

In strong contrast with the foregoing is the next event to which we shall refer.

When he was eleven years old, Leicester gave the Queen that magnificent reception at Kenilworth which is so well known from its memorials in our literature. It has been suggested as probable, with quite enough of likelihood to justify a conjecture, that Shakspere may have been present at the dramatic representations then so gorgeously accumulated before her Majesty. If such was the fact, it is easy to imagine what an influence the shows must have had on the mind of the young dramatic genius, at a time when, happily, the critical faculty is not by any means so fully awake as are the receptive and exultant faculties, and when what the nature chiefly needs is excitement to growth, without which all pruning, the most artistic, is useless, as having nothing to operate upon.

When he was fifteen years old, Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch (through the French) was first published. Any reader who has compared one of Shakspere’s Roman plays with the corresponding life in Plutarch, will not be surprised that we should mention this as one of those events which must have been of paramount influence upon Shakspere. It is not likely that he became acquainted with the large folio with its medallion portraits first placed singly, and then repeated side by side for comparison, as soon as it made its appearance, but as we cannot tell when he began to read it, it seems as well to place it in the order its publication would assign to it. Besides, it evidently took such a hold of the man, that it is most probable his acquaintance with it began at a very early period of his history. Indeed, it seems to us to have been one of the most powerful aids to the development of that perception and discrimination of character with which he was gifted to such a remarkable degree. Nor would it be any derogation from the originality of his genius to say, that in a very pregnant sense he must have been a disciple of Plutarch. In those plays founded on Plutarch’s stories he picked out every dramatic point, and occasionally employed the very phrases of North’s nervous, graphic, and characteristic English. He seems to have felt that it was an honour to his work to embody in it the words of Plutarch himself, as he knew them first. From him he seems especially to have learned how to bring out the points of a character, by putting one man over against another, and remarking wherein they resembled each other and wherein they differed; after which fashion, in other plays as well as those, he partly arranged his dramatic characters.

Not long after he went to London, when he was twenty-two, the death of Sir Philip Sidney at the age of thirty-two, must have had its unavoidable influence on him, seeing all Europe was in mourning for the death of its model, almost ideal man. In England the general mourning, both in the court and the city, which lasted for months, is supposed by Dr. Zouch to have been the first instance of the kind; that is, for the death of a private person. Renowned over the civilized world for everything for which a man could be renowned, his literary fame must have had a considerable share in the impression his death would make on such a man as Shakspere. For although none of his works were published till after his death, the first within a few months of that event, his fame as a writer was widely spread in private, and report of the same could hardly fail to reach one who, although he had probably no friends of rank as yet, kept such keen open ears for all that was going on around him. But whether or not he had heard of the literary greatness of Sir Philip before his death, the “Arcadia,” which was first published four years after his death (1590), and which in eight years had reached the third edition—with another still in Scotland the following year—must have been full of interest to Shakspere. This book is very different indeed from the ordinary impression of it which most minds have received through the confident incapacity of the critics of last century. Few books have been published more fruitful in the results and causes of thought, more sparkling with fancy, more evidently the outcome of rich and noble habit, than this “Arcadia” of Philip Sidney. That Shakspere read it, is sufficiently evident from the fact that from it he has taken the secondary but still important plots in two of his plays.

Although we are anticipating, it is better to mention here another book, published in the same year, namely, 1590, when Shakspere was six-and-twenty: the first three books of Spenser’s “Faery Queen.” Of its reception and character it is needless here to say anything further than, of the latter, that nowadays the depths of its teaching, heartily prized as that was by no less a man than Milton, are seldom explored. But it would be a labour of months to set out the known and imagined sources of the knowledge and spiritual pabulum of the man who laid every mental region so under contribution, that he has been claimed by almost every profession as having been at one time or another a student of its peculiar science, so marvellously in him was the power of assimilation combined with that of reproduction.

To go back a little: in 1587, when he was three-and-twenty, Mary Queen of Scots was executed. In the following year came that mighty victory of England, and her allies the winds and the waters, over the towering pride of the Spanish Armada. Out from the coasts, like the birds from their cliffs to defend their young, flew the little navy, many of the vessels only able to carry a few guns; and fighting, fire-ships and tempest left this island,—

 
  “This precious stone set in the silver sea,”
 

still a “blessed plot,” with an accumulated obligation to liberty which can only be paid by helping others to be free; and when she utterly forgets which, her doom is sealed, as surely as that of the old empires which passed away in their self-indulgence and wickedness.

When Shakspere was about thirty-two, Sir Walter Raleigh published his glowing account of Guiana, which instantly provided the English mind with an earthly paradise or fairy-land. Raleigh himself seems to have been too full of his own reports for us to be able to suppose that he either invented or disbelieved them; especially when he represents the heavenly country to which, in expectation of his execution, he is looking forward, after the fashion of those regions of the wonderful West:—

 
  “Then the blessed Paths wee’l travel,
  Strow’d with Rubies thick as gravel;
  Sealings of Diamonds, Saphire floors,
  High walls of Coral, and Pearly Bowers.”
 

Such were some of the influences which widened the region of thought, and excited the productive power, in the minds of the time. After this period there were fewer of such in Shakspere’s life; and if there had been more of them they would have been of less import as to their operation on a mind more fully formed and more capable of choosing its own influences. Let us now give a backward glance at the history of the art which Shakspere chose as the means of easing his own mind of that wealth which, like the gold and the silver, has a moth and rust of its own, except it be kept in use by being sent out for the good of our neighbours.

It was a mighty gain for the language and the people when, in the middle of the fourteenth century, by permission of the Pope, the miracle-plays, most probably hitherto represented in Norman-French, as Mr. Collier supposes, began to be represented in English. Most likely there had been dramatic representations of a sort from the very earliest period of the nation’s history; for, to begin with the lowest form, at what time would there not, for the delight of listeners, have been the imitation of animal sounds, such as the drama of the conversation between an attacking poodle and a fiercely repellent puss? Through innumerable gradations of childhood would the art grow before it attained the first formal embodiment in such plays as those, so-called, of miracles, consisting just of Scripture stories, both canonical and apocryphal, dramatized after the rudest fashion. Regarded from the height which the art had reached two hundred and fifty years after, “how dwarfed a growth of cold and night” do these miracle-plays show themselves! But at a time when there was no printing, little preaching, and Latin prayers, we cannot help thinking that, grotesque and ill-imagined as they are, they must have been of unspeakable value for the instruction of a people whose spiritual digestion was not of a sort to be injured by the presence of a quite abnormal quantity of husk and saw-dust in their food. And occasionally we find verses of true poetic feeling, such as the following, in “The Fall of Man:”—

 
  Deus. Adam, that with myn handys I made,
        Where art thou now? What hast thou wrought?
 
 
  Adam. A! lord, for synne oure floures do ffade,
        I here thi voys, but I se the nought;
 

implying that the separation between God and man, although it had destroyed the beatific vision, was not yet so complete as to make the creature deaf to the voice of his Maker. Nor are the words of Eve, with which she begs her husband, in her shame and remorse, to strangle her, odd and quaint as they are, without an almost overpowering pathos:—

 
  “Now stomble we on stalk and ston;
  My wyt awey is fro me gon:
  Wrythe on to my necke bon
    With, hardnesse of thin honde.”
 

To this Adam commences his reply with the verses,—

 
  “Wyff, thi wytt is not wurthe a rosche.
  Leve woman, turn thi thought.”
 

And this portion of the general representation ends with these verses, spoken by Eve:—

 
  “Alas! that ever we wrought this synne.
  Oure bodely sustenauns for to wynne,
  Ye must delve and I xal spynne,
    In care to ledyn oure lyff.”
 

In connexion with these plays, one of the contemplations most interesting to us is, the contrast between them and the places in which they were occasionally represented. For though the scaffolds on which they were shown were usually erected in market-places or churchyards, sometimes they rose in the great churches, and the plays were represented with the aid of ecclesiastics. Here, then, we have the rude beginnings of the dramatic art, in which the devil is the unfortunate buffoon, giving occasion to the most exuberant laughter of the people—here is this rude boyhood, if we may so say, of the one art, roofed in with the perfection of another, of architecture; a perfection which now we can only imitate at our best: below, the clumsy contrivance and the vulgar jest; above, the solemn heaven of uplifted arches, their mysterious glooms ringing with the delight of the multitude: the play of children enclosed in the heart of prayer aspiring in stone. But it was not by any means all laughter; and so much, nearer than architecture is the drama to the ordinary human heart, that we cannot help thinking these grotesque representations did far more to arouse the inward life and conscience of the people than all the glory into which the out-working spirit of the monks had compelled the stubborn stone to bourgeon and blossom.

But although, no doubt, there was some kind of growth going on in the drama even during the dreary fifteenth century, we must not suppose that it was by any regular and steady progression that it arrived at the grandeur of the Elizabethan perfection. It was rather as if a dry, knotty, uncouth, but vigorous plant suddenly opened out its inward life in a flower of surpassing splendour and loveliness. When the representation of real historical persons in the miracle-plays gave way before the introduction of unreal allegorical personages, and the miracle-play was almost driven from the stage by the “play of morals” as it was called, there was certainly no great advance made in dramatic representation. The chief advantage gained was room for more variety; while in some important respects these plays fell off from the merits of the preceding kind. Indeed, any attempt to teach morals allegorically must lack that vivifying fire of faith working in the poorest representations of a history which the people heartily believed and loved. Nor when we come to examine the favourite amusement of later royalty, do we find that the interludes brought forward in the pauses of the banquets of Henry VIII. have a claim to any refinement upon those old miracle-plays. They have gained in facility and wit; they have lost in poetry. They have lost pathos too, and have gathered grossness. In the comedies which soon appear, there is far more of fun than of art; and although the historical play had existed for some time, and the streams of learning from the inns of court had flowed in to swell that of the drama, it is not before the appearance of Shakspere that we find any whole of artistic or poetic value. And this brings us to another branch of the subject, of which it seems to us that the importance has never been duly acknowledged. We refer to the use, if not invention, of blank verse in England, and its application to the purposes of the drama. It seems to us that in any contemplation of Shakspere and his times, the consideration of these points ought not to be omitted.

We have in the present day one grand master of blank verse, the Poet Laureate. But where would he have been if Milton had not gone before him; or if the verse amidst which he works like an informing spirit had not existed at all? No doubt he might have invented it himself; but how different would the result have been from the verse which he will now leave behind him to lie side by side for comparison with that of the master of the epic! All thanks then to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey! who, if, dying on the scaffold at the early age of thirty, he has left no poetry in itself of much value, yet so wrote that he refined the poetic usages of the language, and, above all, was the first who ever made blank verse in English. He used it in translating the second and fourth books of Virgil’s “Aeneid.” This translation he probably wrote not long before his execution, which took place in 1547, seventeen years before the birth of Shakspere. There are passages of excellence in the work, and very rarely does a verse quite fail. But, as might be expected, it is somewhat stiff, and, as it were, stunted in sound; partly from the fact that the lines are too much divided, where distinction would have been sufficient. It would have been strange, indeed, if he had at once made a free use of a rhythm which every boy-poet now thinks he can do what he pleases with, but of which only a few ever learn the real scope and capabilities. Besides, the difficulty was increased by the fact that the nearest approach to it in measure was the heroic couplet, so well known in our language, although scarce one who has used it has come up to the variousness of its modelling in the hands of Chaucer, with whose writings Surrey was of course familiar. But various as is its melody in Chaucer, the fact of there being always an anticipation of the perfecting of a rhyme at the end of the couplet would make one accustomed to heroic verse ready to introduce a rhythmical fall and kind of close at the end of every blank verse in trying to write that measure for the first time. Still, as we say, there is good verse in Surrey’s translation. Take the following lines for a specimen, in which the fault just mentioned is scarcely perceptible. Mercury is the subject of them.

 
  “His golden wings he knits, which him transport,
  With a light wind above the earth and seas;
  And then with him his wand he took, whereby
  He calls from hell pale ghosts.
 
 
  “By power whereof he drives the winds away,
  And passeth eke amid the troubled clouds,
  Till in his flight he ‘gan descry the top
  And the steep flanks of rocky Atlas’ hill
  That with his crown sustains the welkin up;
  Whose head, forgrown with pine, circled alway
  With misty clouds, is beaten with wind and storm;
  His shoulders spread with snow; and from his chin
  The springs descend; his beard frozen with ice.
  Here Mercury with equal shining wings
  First touched.”
 

In all comparative criticism justice demands that he who began any mode should not be compared with those who follow only on the ground of absolute merit in the productions themselves; for while he may be inferior in regard to quality, he stands on a height, as the inventor, to which they, as imitators, can never ascend, although they may climb other and loftier heights, through the example he has set them. It is doubtful, however, whether Surrey himself invented this verse, or only followed the lead of some poet of Italy or Spain; in both which countries it is said that blank verse had been used before Surrey wrote English in that measure.