THE NEW NOBILITY 177 Elizabeth's court. But it was not mere court favour that Shakespeare desired for the nobility; he wanted power, such power as would make them balance the crown and obstruct its despotism. It was easy for Elizabeth to combine a narrow and senseless love of caste with a determination to destroy aristocratic privileges and to break the nobles as an independent power in the State. Though Shakespeare evidently felt the regrets which Allen as well as Parsons express, he was not theorist enough to think that the old state of things could be restored by edict. He had traced the progress of decay through centuries, and knew that neither Pope's Bull, nor Act of Parliament, nor Royal Proclamation, could recall the dead to life. Nevertheless, he looked back to the past wistfully, and felt that he and his dearest friends were misplaced in the times when they were living: "Why should he live, now Nature bankrupt is, Beggared of blood? Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, With needy nothing trimmed in jollity, Shakespeare's conception of Henry VIII. shows how he judged him. Henry would fain have been absolute monarch, to whom the least presumption of independence was present death, as the prejudged and murdered Buckingham felt to his sorrow; but knowing that he could not discontent the Commons M with impunity, Henry rebuked his favourite minister for oppressing them. Queen Catherine patronised the Commons out of charity, the king out of policy. Wolsey, whose consummate art is only administrative, who has none other but personal ends, revenge and ambition, will oppress them when he may, and pretend to be their friend when oppression is forbidden. Thus the king, sitting in the seat of Richard III., but raised to it by peaceable succession, not by war and murder, has to maintain himself there by other weapons. Remorseless as Richard and libertine as Edward IV., he is yet a peaceful monarch, and must, apparently at least, confine himself within the limits of law and conscience. The weapons of the barefaced usurper are denied him, but those of the hypocrite are in constant use. Richard III. is an actor, a consummate hypocrite. Henry is a more melodramatic, pretentious, arrogant, oily hypocrite, and his perpetual cry almost serves to characterise him "... Conscience, conscience, O! 'tis a tender place, and I must leave her." Shakespeare is not content with once saying this, the audience must not be allowed to forget it. The marriage with the brother's widow had crept too near Henry's conscience-"No! his conscience has crept too near another lady," whose beauty was such and so tempting that, as one of the courtiers says, "I cannot blame his conscience." It is for this hypocrisy that Cranmer is made necessary for Henry,-" with thy approach I know my comfort comes"; and till this comfort is administered no accusation shall stand between Cranmer and the king's favour. It is here that Shakespeare, supposing this scene to be his, for once condescends to borrow from "Foxe's Acts and Monuments" the first scene of the fifth act, where the king is convinced of Cranmer's honesty by his tears, and delivers him the ring which is to protect him against Gardiner and the rest of the Council. In the whole play the poet takes care to secure our interest successively for Henry's victims; for the noble but wilful Buckingham; for the repudiated Queen, one of the grandest, most touching, most constant, and purest figures that Shakespeare has drawn, and after his fall, for Wolsey himself. In "Henry VI." the people first appear as a political force, in the rebellion of Jack Cade (1450). Shakespeare's treatment of that rising has been condemned by Mr. Wilkes, the American critic, as a deliberate perversion of every fact in the interest of falsehood, selfishness, and tyranny. His account is indeed not historical, yet it accurately represents many features in the Lollard revolt under Wat Tyler in 1380, and is instructive as showing the bent of the poet's sympathies in religion no less than in politics. Those sympathies were certainly not with any Lollard movement. But Shakespeare is not to be considered 1 66 Shakespeare from an American Point of View," 239. 1877. in consequence a blind worshipper of kings or nobles. On the contrary, he fully recognised the bitter sufferings inflicted at times on the lower classes by the injustice and tyranny of their rulers. Hence the indictment of Richard II. for the exorbitant taxation of the Commons, and Catherine's speech on their behalf in " Henry VIII.," where she declares that the exactions, extending even to the sixth part of their substance, were sapping the foundation of loyalty and order in the kingdom. "Cold hearts freeze Allegiance in them; their curses now -Henry VIII., i. 2. So too in this very scene (in "Henry VI.") the poet gives in Lord Say the portrait of a true nobleman, just, generous, merciful, tender-hearted, wan and worn in his judicial labours on behalf of the poor and the afflicted, simple in his attire and tastes, incapable of taking a bribe, a patron of learning, the friend of poor scholars. In this character he pleads for his life— "Justice with favour have I always done; Prayers and tears have mov'd me, gifts could never. Kent to maintain, the king, the realm, and you? Large gifts have I bestowed on learned clerks. Long sitting to determine poor men's causes TYPES OF NOBLENESS Have I affected wealth or honour; speak? Whom have I injur'd that ye seek my death?" 181 —2 Henry VI., iv. 7. Shakespeare thus plainly regards the nobles as the appointed guardians and defenders of the poor, and he knows of no absolute title to rank or wealth which is free from these obligations. For the poor again, the lower classes, as such, he has none of the old heathen contempt, the odo profanum vulgus et arceo, the scorn which, as Mr. Devas has so well pointed out, Milton expresses in the "Samson Agonistes." "Nor do I name the men of common birth, That wandering loose about, Grow up and perish, like the summer flies, Heads without name, no more remembered." For Shakespeare saw all men, and reverenced all, whatever their exterior, as possessed of rational souls, and made in the image of God. Thus some of his highest examples of loyalty, fidelity, courage, generosity, and affection are found in the lowest grade of the social scale. Such are Corin the shepherd in "Winter's Tale," and Adam, Orlando's servant, in "As You Like It," and the servants of the Duke of Gloucester, and the fool in "Lear," and the groom of Richard II., already noticed. In these cases sympathy with their superiors in affliction 1 "Shakespeare as an Economist” (Dublin Review, vol. xiii.). |