CHAPTER VI

SHAKESPEARE-(continued)

IF the sixteenth century had closed brightly for Shakespeare, the seventeenth Shakespeare began in cloud and storm. His own position may not have been affected, at beginning but he must have suffered deeply with his patron and his friend. We have century seen him celebrating Essex's Irish expedition in Henry V., and promising that the hero should return, “bearing rebellion broached upon his sword." Things had turned out far otherwise. Falling from one disaster to another, Essex, in February 1601, was goaded into the mad attempt at revolution which brought him to the scaffold, and his ally Southampton, Shakespeare's friend and Mæcenas, to the Tower. In the same month, Pembroke, the subject, as we have contended, of Shakespeare's Sonnets, incurred, like Raleigh before him, the Queen's displeasure by an intrigue with a maid of honour. He was imprisoned and banished the Court. It has already been remarked that the month of his imprisonment corresponds with the month of April during which Shakespeare laments his severance from his friend. We are nevertheless not disposed to connect the circumstances, as Shakespeare seems to write as one who has himself been absent in the country. The date of the absence may with probability be conjectured from the first four lines of Sonnet XCVIII. :

From you have I been absent in the spring,

When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,

That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him.

Saturn may be merely a poetical synonym for Time; but if, as is more probable, the planet Saturn is denoted, he certainly is not introduced at random. Mr. George Wyndham has most ingeniously surmised a reference to the peculiar brilliancy of Saturn when in opposition to the sun, and thus at his greatest possible distance. The sun in April is in Aries and Taurus, and to be in opposition to him Saturn must be in Libra or Scorpio, as actually was the case at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. This acute observation may be reinforced by another derived from the kindred study of astrology. Libra is astrologically the exaltation of Saturn, one of the signs in which he is supposed to be most potent. He may therefore with great propriety be said to "laugh and leap" in it. He was in Libra

and opposed to the sun in the April of 1599 and 1600. The latter date would agree best with the general chronological scheme of the Sonnets.

"Julius Cesar"

It is an interesting speculation whether the conspiracy of Essex contributed to direct Shakespeare's attention to the conspiracy of Brutus as the subject of his next play. There can be little doubt that Julius Cæsar appeared in 1601, for it is alluded to in Weever's Mirror of Martyrs, published in that year, and it seems out of keeping with the plays of 1599-1600. Professor

Dowden has pointed out its intellectual affinity to Hamlet, a drama of the succeeding year. In resorting to Plutarch for a subject, Shakespeare was merely repeating the procedure with the English chroniclers which had answered so well in his English historical plays, but he had now to deal with material already sifted by a masterly hand. It was not the especial business of the English chroniclers to record noble actions: they relate the history of the times with fidelity, and take things noble or ignoble as they come.

"JULIUS CÆSAR"

225

But Plutarch's Lives are eclectic; his aim is to preserve what is really memorable in a strictly human point of view, and in so doing he gives it so admirable a form that Shakespeare himself cannot improve upon

it.

Many, therefore, of

the most striking traits and sayings in Julius Cæsar are taken directly from his biographies of Cæsar and Brutus. Referring back from the poet to the biographer, we find continually how what has most impressed and charmed us belongs to Plutarch. An inferior writer would have attempted to heighten or refine upon his original. Shakespeare never alters what he knows cannot be improved. Where, however, he sees his opportunity, he fairly carries Plutarch away in his talons. The finest scenes in the play, scenes which Shakespeare himself never surpassedthe oratory and tumult at the funeral of Cæsar and the dispute between Brutus and Cassius-are developed from the merest hints. With exquisite judgment, these grand displays of eloquence and passion are reserved for the part of the play that requires

Title page of the First Quarto of "Hamlet"
From the only extant copy, in the library of the Duke of Devon-
shire at Chatsworth. (Reproduced from Mr. Sidney
Lee's "Life of Shakespeare" by permission of
Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co.)

them. The first half, full of incident and character, needs no embellishment; but after Cæsar's death the interest would flag but for these potent reinforcements. In another respect Shakespeare is very dependent upon. Plutarch-the delineation of character. He has not to do here with rude faint outlines, like the traditional Macbeth or the traditional Lear, but with portraits painted after authentic history by the hand of a master. These

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Shakespeare

he follows religiously. It hence comes to pass that in the character of
Brutus he has made a nearer approach than anywhere else to drawing a
perfect man, for Plutarch will have it so. "In all Brutus's life," says
Plutarch, after recording one undeniable blot, "there is but this one fault
to be found," and Shakespeare's Brutus is equally perfect ethically, save
for his requiring Cassius's prompting to do what he should have resolved
upon by himself.
Professor Dowden justly points out the analogy with
Hamlet. The very perfection of Brutus's moral nature renders him ineffi-
cient intellectually; he cannot condescend to the sphere of an unscrupulous
man of the world like Antony, and Antony beats him from the field. This,
of course, is also in Plutarch, but Plutarch does not show, as Shakespeare
does, the necessary connection of Brutus's moral nobility with his intellectual
failings. The other personages are depicted as in Plutarch, but with much.
greater vividness. The subordination of Cæsar's part has been censured,
but appears inevitable. Had Cæsar been a more prominent character he must
have been represented in personal relation to Brutus, inimical or benevolent.
If the former, suspicion must have been cast upon the disinterestedness of
Brutus's patriotism; if the latter, he would have been open to the charge
of ingratitude.

There is an interesting indication that Shakespeare read other lives of and Plutarch Plutarch than those he dramatised, and even before he had written Julius Cæsar. Cæsar says to Antony, wishing to elicit his opinion of Cassius :

Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf,
And tell me truly what thou think'st of him.

Cæsar is nowhere represented as deaf, but the idea seems borrowed from Plutarch's statement, in his life of Alexander the Great, that Alexander "always used to lay his hand upon one of his ears to keep that clean from the matter of accusation."

On the whole, save for defects inherent in the subject, Julius Cæsar is perhaps as perfect a work as the dramatist's art is capable of producing. That perfection and power are not convertible terms appears from the undeniable fact that Shakespeare's next production, though imperfect in structure and full of puzzling riddles, has affected mankind far more deeply and exhibits qualities far more exceptional. This play is Hamlet.

The stage history of Hamlet is remarkable. It is entered on the Stationers' Register in 1602 as a piece lately acted. In 1603 a quarto edition appeared containing not more than about three-fifths of the play as republished in the following year. In the earlier edition Polonius is called Corambis, and there are many discrepancies in language and in the arrangement of scenes and speeches. It is a highly interesting question whether the first edition was printed after an imperfect or an acting copy, or possibly taken down in shorthand during the performance, or whether Shakespeare himself revised and enlarged his drama. The former seems the more probable supposition; although even the second edition, described as "printed from the only true

and perfect copy," wants several passages found in the folio of 1623, though this again has various signs showing that it was abridged for the stage. These may have been retrenched owing to the length of the play, or may have been subsequent addi

tions. We feel that Hamlet expresses more of Shakespeare's inner mind than any other of his works, and is the most likely of any to have been subjected to close revision. One trifling circumstance indicates revision, the alteration of twelve years, given in the First Quarto as the period for which Yorick's skull had been interred, to twenty-three upon Shakespeare's marking that he had made Hamlet a man of thirty.

re

Another interesting question is the

relation of

Shakespeare's drama to an older play. From an allusion of Thomas Nash we learn the existence in 1589 of a play on the subject of Hamlet, in which a ghost ap

The opening page of the First Quarto of "Hamlet" From the copy (wanting the title-page) in the British Museum peared crying" Revenge! The theme may well have been suggested by the English actors lately returned from Copenhagen, and, perhaps, were the play now extant, the origin of Shakespeare's remarkable acquaintance with the topography of Elsinore might be ascertained. It has been attributed with much probability to Thomas Kyd. It was acted again in 1594, and must have been well known to Shakespeare, who, no doubt, took from it the idea of Hamlet