were in a starving condition; and their miserable and desperate appearance alarmed the queen in her royal progresses, and with reason. For such suffering "Makes bold mouths: Tongues spit their duties out, and cold hearts freeze Live where their prayers did; and it's come to pass To each incensèd will.-Henry VIII., i. 2. Elizabeth felt the truth of this, and in 1595 ordered that all vagabonds near London should be hanged; and along with the religious and priests— peaceable citizens put to death for practising the Faith, which the queen at her coronation had sworn to defend- -some 500 criminals or vagrants were executed every year. Hentzner says that he counted above thirty heads on London Bridge.1 Elizabeth's merciless decree seems indeed to have been carried out in the spirit of Timon's speech : "Put armour on thine ears and on thine eyes; And the condition of the new nobility revealed equally the weight of the new despotism now pressing on the country. Mere upstarts and adventurers, like Cecil and Paulet, without name or lineage, with no principle but their own gain, the servile instruments of the Crown, were wholly incapable of 1 "Travels in England" (edited by H. Walpole, 1797), 3. resisting its encroachments, and were poor substitutes for the Neviles, Percys, Howards, who, whatever their faults, had repeatedly saved the liberties of their country. The Commons also were reduced to a state of vassalage. Elizabeth informed her first Parliament, through Bacon, that she consulted them not from necessity, but from choice, to render her laws more acceptable to the people. Parliaments were in fact summoned only to legalise some act of royal oppression. So too with the executive: the judge ruled and the jury found, not according to law or fact, but as the sovereign willed; and with the army of spies and informers ready to offer any evidence required, no subject's life was safe. The Tudor sovereignty, then, represented a new Cæsarism; all the intermediary checks on absolutism were swept away; the body politic consisted of two factors, the monarch and the multitude. Now, such a system was in Shakespeare's judgment destructive of the very life of a State. In Ulysses' speech, condemning the factions in the Grecian camp, we have the poet's principle of government. All things in nature, he says, are in a graduated scale, and their strength and stability depend on the due subordination or relation of part to part. "The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order." -Troilus and Cressida, i. 3. "Degree being vizarded," without this order and the due nexus of link to link, "the unity and married calm of states is rent and cracked." By degree alone or the ordered juncture of successive grades, merit is recognised, scholarship, civil and commercial life, are advanced and secured. Degree gone, when all men are kept under the mask of a dead level, there is no distinction between the unworthiest and the most deserving. To respect of superiors succeeds "envious fever" of those in authority. Justice is no more; force alone is right; and force is but the instrument of appetite or greed, "an universal wolf," which, after consuming all else, "last eats up himself." an Such was Shakespeare's view of a levelling tyranny, and he saw his country the victim to this scourge. The England, then, which he loved, "This dear, dear land, Dear for her reputation throughout the world," was not the England of his day. No, his country might be great in naval adventure, in industrial and commercial enterprise; new fields of wealth might be opened out to certain classes, but its true greatness and ancient liberty, its former glory, its true chivalry were gone, and "That England which was wont to conquer others, The Elizabethan pageants might dazzle others, to him they were but pinchbeck splendour and tinsel ANTAGONISM TO HIS TIMES 45 pomp, the trappings of oppression and shame. Thus he delivers his soul: "Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,— As, to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimmed in jollity, -Sonnet lxvi. Professor Dowden says that Shakespeare must have been the product of his age, unless he were in antagonism to it. We think we have already given considerable proof of the existence of such antagonism, and the proof will be confirmed if we consider his historical plays. In dealing with English history, consider then the subjects he might have chosen, had he been the product of the Elizabethan era. The overthrow of the Pope, as treated by Bale in "The Troublesome Reign of King John," or by Spenser in "The Faerie Queene"; the Gunpowder Plot denounced by Ben Jonson in his "Catiline"; the destruction of the Armada, as sung by Dekker; the glorification of Elizabeth, as added by Fletcher to "Henry VIII."-all these themes, instinct with the triumphs of the new order, were before him, yet not one of them finds mention in his song. On the contrary, his Muse is occupied, almost exclusively, with the men and women, the spirit and temper, the speech and customs of feudal times. His ideal prince is Henry V., and his portraiture is drawn in markedly Catholic lines. King John, the accepted representative of a Protestant king, the prototype of Henry VIII. in his triumphant conflict with the Pope, becomes in Shakespeare's hands a mean villain and the vanquished suppliant to the Roman Legate. Henry VIII. himself is depicted as a cruel, selfish, base hypocrite, with an audacity which made Dr. Dollinger remark, as Simpson tells us, that, seeing what Shakespeare might have made of him as the founder of Protestantism, this play furnishes the strongest proof of the poet's Catholic sympathies. Elizabeth herself is passed over in silence; and even at her death, when all the contemporary poets were chiming her glories and virtues, Shakespeare alone was silent; and to mark still further the contrast, the heroine of his choice in Tudor times is the pure, noble, Catholic queen, the divorced and dethroned Katherine. In opposition to what has been said, Shakespeare's frequent biblical references and quotations are advanced as a convincing argument on behalf of his Protestantism; especially by the late Bishop Wordsworth of St. Andrews, and recently, by the |