LOVE AND PHILOSOPHY

247

in his doctrine of love, he is equally a disciple of Aristotle in his theory of knowledge.

Now we have seen in the interpretation given of the sonnets, that the true and adequate object of the soul, where "it knows even as it is known," is the ideal truth, goodness, and beauty, "marriage with which admits of no impediments" (Sonnet 116). In this ideal alone, mind and heart, thought and feeling, find at last their true term, and love and philosophy become identified in the knowledge of, and union with, the "only fair." Till that object is found and the soul is drawn out of itself in pursuit of its ideal, there can be no development of character, or art, learning, or love worthy of the

name.

As love and philosophy are identical in the lower spheres of truth and love, so in the highest sphere of all, absolute truth and love are one. From this unity of principle, ordering all things in harmony, from the "smallest orb to the young-eyed cherubim," and guiding all to their one end, arises again the affinity between love and religion found in Shakespeare's plays. Beauty of face or form is but a reflection of the one exemplar, and the love inspired by created fairness should end in worship which, in itself and its object, is wholly spiritual.

It follows from what has been said that the religious allusions that abound in Shakespeare's love poetry are neither profane mockeries, nor metaphysical figures, but the expression of the poet's

sense of the simple tendency of unimpeded love, of the real community between true love and true religion. Hence comes the importance of considering, as has been already pointed out, what form of religion Shakespeare adopts in his love plays. Does he make true love, when it uses religious language, speak the language of Protestantism, of the English Prayer-book and Homilies, or that of the old religion? Dramatic exigencies in no way hampered his choice. He need not have selected Catholic countries, or if he did, his reverence for the conventionalities of times or places was not sufficiently powerful to make him its slave. Thus, the "Merry Wives of Windsor" belongs to the days of Henry V.; yet Evans is a Protestant parson. Illyria, the scene of "Twelfth Night," could hardly be a Protestant country; yet the religious allusions in it are to a Protestant society. If Shakespeare had felt that it had been proper to make true love speak as a Protestant, he either would not have chosen the stories of "Romeo and Juliet" or the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," or if he had, he would boldly have made Romeo speak with the tongue of the Reformers.

With this much of preface, we will proceed with the examination of Shakespeare's love plays, beginning with "Love's Labour's Lost." According to the laws of chivalry, which were essentially religious, a knight had to prove his manhood by deeds of courage and endurance, his fidelity by prolonged

"LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST"

249

absence and many tests of his constancy, before he could lay claim to the hand of his only fair. The practice of penance or of ascetic exercises in some form was thus regarded, according to the mediæval code of love, as a necessary condition for winning the affection of the beloved object. The same law is expressed in Shakespeare. The princess in "Love's Labour's Lost" sentences the king, if he would gain her, to spend a year in a hermitage, remote from all worldly pleasures, living austerely, "Nipped by frosts and fasts, hard lodging and thin weeds." Biron, too, is condemned by Rosaline to spend a year in a hospital as a penance for the presumption of his love, and as a test of his constancy. The same practice appears in the "Two Gentlemen of Verona."

"I have done penance for contemning love
With bitter fasts, with penitential groans,

With mighty tears and daily heartsore sighs" (ii. 4).

Among the trials proposed by Hamlet to Laertes as a test of their love was fasting. "Wilt fast?" The practice is abused if exaggerated or undertaken without a worthy object and a reasonable hope of success. Cervantes satirised this abuse in his portrait of Don Quixote alone in the desert, stripped to the nude and meditating on Dulcinea, who was wholly ignorant of his affection. The purpose of 'Love's Labour's Lost," then, is not to satirise the

1 v. 2.

religious state, as some German critics have taught, but is to show the futility of undertaking penance, study, or solitude without an adequate motive, viz. the likelihood of attaining the beloved object. These things are not good in themselves but in their end. Without this end penance and solitude are but "pain purchasing pain," and study, without a higher light guiding it, is but to lose one's sight.

The comedy in "Love's Labour's Lost," like that in the "Merry Wives of Windsor," is meant to be Protestant. The pedant and the curate, Nathaniel and Holofernes, dread of speaking concerning the Fathers. "Tell me not of the Fathers; I do fear colourable colours" (iv. 2). Under their training, Costard catches the knack of pulpit oratory, already observed in Falstaff, and repeated, as we shall see, in Bottom. His formal discourse on the law-text, "in matter and form following" (i. 1), would be pointless were it not evidently a parody of the sermonizing of the day. The ministers themselves are exhibited, not indeed as vicious or corrupt, but as weak-minded pedants, timid and time-serving, and totally void both of that sturdy fidelity incapable of betraying "the devil to his fellow "the attribute of the poet's true heroes--and of that versatility, fertile of expedients in difficulties, peculiar to his Friars.

In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona" the moral seems to be fidelity in love, based, as we have seen in the sonnets, on the conviction of the sovereign

truth, goodness, and beauty of the beloved mistress. Thus Silvia says to Proteus:

"Thou hast no faith left now, unless thou hadst two, And that's far worse than none; better have none Than plural faith, which is too much by one" (v. 3).

Constancy in love is the corner-stone of virtue in Shakespeare's eyes.

"O Heaven,

Were man but constant, he were perfect; that one error
Fills him with faults, makes him run through all sins;
Inconstancy falls off e'er it begins" (v. 4).

"

That Shakespeare carried this feeling into religion also is seen from the contempt with which he speaks of those who go where grace is said "in any religion ("Measure for Measure," i. 2), and of that "pastsaving slave" Parolles, who offers to take the sacrament "how or which way you will" ("All's Well that Ends Well," iv. 3), very much as we have seen Ben Jonson did. Hence the sting of Beatrice's taunt of Benedick ("Much Ado about Nothing," i. 1),

He wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat. It ever changes with the next block." On the other hand, infidelity in love, the religion of the eye, is heresy, and the woman who causes it is said to "found a sect." Even the true professions of a lover who is rejected are called heresy, for truth is not

1 "Romeo and Juliet," i. 2, 93; "Cymbeline," iii. 4; "Merry Wives of Windsor," iv. 4; "Midsummer-Night's Dream," ii. 3. 2 "Twelfth Night," i. 5.