Age has told on him, thoughts of the end importune him, but still he is not writing of himself. If he were, he would not be himself,-so disengaged and noble, like the ancient poets.

8.

As in his will there are no literary men, so there are none in either his plays or his poems, and himself Shakespeare scarcely accounts one of them. Yet most of his finer characters-Henry and Hotspur, Brutus and Antony, Hamlet and Othello-live and die, like those of the ancients, mindful of fame and glory. He had heard the sound thereof. For himself possibly he was above it, and anticipating the bleak idealism of our day, thought, with Fichte, thirst for fame a contemptible vanity, or with Tennyson, 'merely the pleasure of hearing oneself talked of up and down the street.' But to such sentiments he never gives utterance, and when he touches on the subject it is in the spirit of the first words of his earliest comedy:

Let fame that all hunt after in their lives

Live registered upon our brazen tombs. . . .

It is remarkable that Shakespeare never treats the subject ironically, in modern style, the fruits of ambition crumbling at a touch to ashes. He is neither disappointed nor cynical. Honour is 'a word'—is but 'air'-only for one man in his theatre, who is fat and old, who had already preferred the inconvenience of flight to the terrors of combat, and who likes not the grinning honour that Sir Walter hath.'

15

It is all well enough for Ruskin to make Shakespeare too lofty, or for Sir Leslie Stephen to make him too ironical and indifferent. There is, in his precise and meticulous will and all his orderly business-like life in London and Stratford, evidence to the contrary. 'Literary glory, though one may talk of it in sonnets, is a trifle'; but what are 'land and See the chapter on Falstaff, section 23.

beeves,' houses and furniture, a coat of arms and the title of gentleman? And surely fame for ever, if you know you have duly earned and won it, is a better thing than founding a family in Stratford and leaving an estate in strict entail. It may be better even for the heirs. But Shakespeare sought that form of self-perpetuation which he most craved, or had a right, he thought, to expect. In Ratseis Ghost (1605) a player is by Ratsey the highwayman given advice (which he takes) to 'buy thee some place or lordship in the country, that growing weary of playing, thy money may bring thee to dignity and reputation.' And in the Return from Parnassus (c. 1601) it is said of actors that, profiting by the poor poets who write for them,

They purchase land and now esquires are made.

So did Heminge and Condell, Burbage, Phillips, and Alleyn, and for that matter, ambitious Englishmen generally in Shakespeare's day, as in this. What but an actor, manager, and playwright-but a successful man from Warwickshire-was he? London had not thought him more, nor did he think of appealing from it to posterity or all-judging Jove. Like his fellow playwrights, he did not publish his plays; like his fellow players he saved money, bought land, and got him a little title; like his fellow Englishmen, he retired to the country-went home again-when his work was over; and when the time came he wrote his will like a player and solid country gentleman, nothing more. As with the simplest of men (and certainly the happiest) instinct in him chimed with his country's custom; and he followed it save when he had reason to choose another course. He did as others did, who, both as a man and as the supreme dramatist, thought and felt like others-even as regards himself. A sweet irony is in the thought that the few who see themselves somewhat as others see them, are, like the many who do not, mistaken.

9.

And he wrote accordingly;-still as an actor, a manager, and a maker of stage-plays, which were not literature. Hence his indifference to what he had written-his happy indifference, in a way, while he wrote, having only himself and pit and gallery to please. No one has regarded readers less, for he expected none; he had no critics to fear and face but those in gallery and pit, who can be wooed to forget to be critical; and he wrote only for immediate effect, with otherwise unlimited liberty of utterance. So according to Monsieur Donnay wrote even Molière," though he printed his plays. Shakespeare was writing only playbooks for his company, like Lope de Vega, not, like Corneille and Racine, immortal verse; his art satisfied him and his company only as it swayed audiences at the Globe; and since he thought only of swaying them and not of himself or his fame, he wrote often faultily, yet he has swayed the world. Shylock or Falstaff or the Ghosts he made only for himself and the Elizabethan audience, not one Shylock or Falstaff or Ghost for them, and another, lurking in the lines, for enlightened you and me. To us, for all our learning and fine feelings, he, like Cervantes, gave no thought; the treatises on Shakespeare (as on Cervantes) the seer and philosopher, doctor, lawyer, naturalist, or geographer (teneatis risum), are vain; and as has been said of the Spaniard, 'his learning is naught, his reasonings are futile. . . . He is immortal [and universal] only by reason of his creative power, his imaginative resource, his wealth of invention, his inimitable humour, his boundless sympathy.' "

He was free (and therefore was his audience spellbound), free of the trammels of self-consciousness and of those dread requirements of art which cow and confine the spirit.

L

Hence the virtues of his writing, and hence its defects. It is, in the best of circumstances, notoriously a difficult thing to write a play, to hold an audience of all sorts and descriptions fast and breathless in their seats, pack a significant story into the compass of three hours-not much more, not much less and meet all the exacting and capricious demands of stage, company, and occasion; but it is immeasurably a more difficult thing to write a play which also conforms to the rules or requirements of literature. These last, Shakespeare, we have seen, could ignore, not only the arbitrary precepts of academic criticism, the canons of Aristotle and the Renaissance critics, the unities, the trappings of chorus and prologue, and the principles of decorum-if Shakespeare knew them, he, like Lope, deliberately though apologetically, disobeyed them, but those rules (if such there be) which hold good and are in force for ever. Writing rapidly and impetuously, careless and thoughtless of the cool and carping reader in his closet, he disregarded minor matters of consistency and plausibility, whilst he framed his great stage-stories, as no other great writer, even for the theatres, has done. In the twentieth line of the first scene of Othello, Cassio has a wife, though not long after it is clear enough that he not only has none but had never had any. He has one in the original story; and, unlike the dramatist, who, on being asked about his play, said it was finished he had only to write the verses-Shakespeare here was already writing the verses before he had finished the play. So, Lady Macbeth, in the first act of the tragedy, seems, as she spurs her husband on, to have had a child:

I have given suck, and know

How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me;

but Goethe is certainly right in thinking that she is made to say this only to lend emphasis to the desperate speech which ensues. Why in King Lear should the Fool vanish with the tempest, nevermore to be thought of or mentioned by Lear

or by Cordelia? Do Timon, Lady Macbeth, and Ophelia kill themselves? And there is 'young Hamlet,' can he really be fat and over thirty? Why does Richard II stop the combat between Bolingbroke and Mowbray? Is Mowbray guilty? Why does Cleopatra flee from battle and Antony? Why do Banquo and Desdemona's Emilia hold their tongues, and the Courts at Forres and Elsinore take so little notice of the remarkable deportment of royalty at functions? And why does Polixenes save his own skin and leave Hermione in the lurch? There is no answer, nor in this world will there be any. These are a few of the oversights or omissions, inconsistencies or improbabilities, in the text, not to be laid at the door of the printer, out of a multitude. Something like a dozen of the sort have been pointed out by Dr Bradley and others in King Lear alone.

Such are the fruits of freedom-defects due to rapid and careless workmanship (for, as several critics have observed, Shakespeare was little troubled by the literary conscience), and to a concern for immediate effect which at times becomes no more than a concern for the momentary. And as for the quibbles and rant-'his comick wit, as Dryden puts it, 'degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast,'-though his audience delighted in rant and revelled in puns and clenches, it is a delight which he must not have entirely disdained himself. Not for long can a man delight others who is not himself delighted. When we see how frequently he falls into bad taste it seems less improbable that he should not have known that he was one of the greatest of poets. That he was, like many poets, not a sure critic of his own or others' work appears from Hamlet's warm words of praise for the turgid and bombastic lines about Pyrrhus and Hecuba which the Player at his request repeats for him; but it appears more clearly from the prodigal manner in which he heaps imperfections upon perfections in almost every play.