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was a contest between two vulgar men. They were well matched in lowness of views, but not in meanness of motives; for here Sir Thomas was the superior, as he merely defended an hereditary privilege. Shakespeare wanted to steal that as a conventional quit-claim for having stolen Sir Lucy's deer. "Still poaching on my manor," testy Sir Thomas might have cried, if this had been true.

But it was not true. Indeed, Mr. White, in attempting to inoculate the brain whence "Hamlet" and the "Tempest " sprung with this maggot of an upper-ten-dom, presents an argument that contains its own refutation. For the statement, on p. 113, that John Shakespeare made the application for a grant of coat-armor, in 1596, at the instigation of his son, is contradicted by the admission on p. 119, that the arms were granted in consequence of an application made by the father twenty years previously, when he was a prosperous man, and bailiff of Stratford. In other words, the father had always coveted the privilege to bear a coat of arms, and referred his claim for them to the services of his wife's ancestor towards King Henry VII. We do not know how many times. he had renewed his application; but the Garter King at Arms, who conferred the arms in 1599, justified himself by the allegation that John Shakespeare "sheweth a patent thereof under Clarence Cook's hands in paper xx. years past; " and the grant expressly stated that this was his ancient coat of arms, "heretofore assigned him whilst he was Her Majesty's officer and baylefe."

John Shakespeare, though poor and fallen in estate, stripped of all his village dignities, could not forget them nor his claim to privileges derived from ancestral service. The less real estate he possessed, the more he clung to this fictitious estate conferred by parchment from the Herald's College. He was just the man not to give up without a struggle the hope which his neighbor, Sir Thomas, had perhaps succeeded in frustrating for several years. And, doubtless, the son had no objection to seeing his ancient enemy foiled and mortified; for he makes fun of Sir Thomas's punctilio in the matter of coat-armor in the first scene of the "Merry Wives of Wind

sor." But, if he sympathized with his father in this contest with a rich and powerful neighbor, he none the less felt the absurdity of the whole transaction which made his father see "his son a gentleman before him." And when he puts this into the mouth of the Fool in "Lear," if he was thinking of his father, as Mr. White surmises, it was no folly of his own that suggested the satire, nor any complicity in that of his father, except so far as his satisfaction went to see Sir Thomas baffled. And, when we consider the social aspirations of that period in England, the father does not appear, relatively to them, foolish in pressing a claim to which he had some show of right. The folly would have been on the part of the poet in instigating such a claim for his own advantage, because he prized the second-hand consideration it would bring. We can believe that Shakespeare was sharp at making a bargain, strict in his dealings, and inexorable in demanding the same strictness from others; that he would prosecute a claim for debt, and get the money, notwithstanding the poverty of the debtor, which might seem to be a claim to a poet's consideration. An eye to business, and an eye “in a fine frenzy rolling," were two distinct things. But there is neither business nor poesy in this metropolitan notion of Mr. White, that Shakespeare languished for the consideration that is paid to a technical gentility.

After all, Mr. White would have us believe that Shakespeare returned to Stratford a disappointed man, because he had no son to be the third gentleman of his family! Certainly, if we weep at this suggestion, they will be "the first gentleman-like tears that ever we shed." The poet, eager for conventional consideration, yet conscious of the absurdity of the whole transaction of the coat-armor, is plunged in grief because he has no son to succeed to the absurdity. Not content with making a fool of himself, for a consideration, it was "with bitterness of soul that he saw the disappearance of his hopes of being the head of a family ranking among the gentry of England." And this, after having culminated in that consciousness of genius which the composing of " Macbeth," "Lear," and “Hamlet” must have given him; after experiencing the

first thrills of the successive inspirations which have thrilled eight generations of gentle and simple minds, and won from all of them a confirmation of the patent of nobility which his own hand first signed when his thoughts ennobled him at the moment of their birth. Mr. White suggests that he undervalued his plays because the profession of a playwright was unfashionable in England. He says, on p. 168:

"It is to this prejudice and to Shakespeare's desire to stand with the world as a gentleman of substance and character, and not as an actor and playwright, that we must attribute his neglect of his dramas, after they had discharged their double function of filling his pockets and giving his brain employment, and his soul expression."

Can it be that he could write "Hamlet" and "Lear," without a conviction that they were not mere playwrights' work, and with more desire to be considered a gentleman by heraldry than their author? Egotism melted away in these moments of profound emotion, which brought down consciousness of genius to supply its place. Not all the Shakespearian commentators can make us believe, that he subordinated his personal delight in the pomps of his imagination, and his continual sense of their permanent grandeur, to any social or pecuniary motive.

Sometimes we hear that Shakespeare had a childlike unconsciousness of the divine gift that possessed him; so profound, in fact, that he did not appreciate what he had written, but preferred the early poems, and condemned the plays to neg lect. That he was free from vanity, and lived with all men in a naïve and simple temper, we can believe. The broad and majestic elements of his works are in harmony with our feeling that he never aired his superiority, indulged no pettiness of behavior or of motive. But if ever a man lived who justly appreciated what personal passion, what conscious revel and turmoil, marshalled each play toward its climaxes of mirth or pathos, it was William Shakespeare. With all his ease of composition, he was no mere passage of the voice of a divine ventriloquist; but his soul shook with its own deep vibrations, and his power reported itself first, and most intelli

gently, to himself. Shakespeare's neglect of his plays was only apparent, and arose from the fact that they were written for acting companies who owned the manuscripts, and jealously guarded them from publication. Shakespeare was paid for them, and perhaps derived something from their representations; but he had parted with the right to publish them, except in one or two instances, when he sent them to the stage. Otherwise, if he loved money so well as Mr. White surmises, and wanted money to support the dignity of coat-armor, he might have taken advantage of the rage for plays in the reading public, and for the demand for his own, which became so great, even before he left London, that copies of them were surreptitiously obtained, most likely by a slovenly short-hand process during the representation.* Our thrifty and titlehunting poet would have turned the popularity to account, if he had not put the plays beyond his control, for the sake of enriching the theatrical company whose shares he held.

It has been supposed, from this apparent neglect of the plays, that Shakespeare coincided with the judgment of the critics of his day who extolled the Venus and the Lucrece, and preferred these poems, and doubtless the Sonnets also, to his plays. We can never believe, that his personal experience in the act of composing the pieces which mark the height of his maturity did not serve him with a better judgment. And he would have lavished as much care and literary watchfulness upon the publication of the plays that were chiefly written by him, as he did upon these earlier poems; but the plays were not his to publish. In the case of "King Lear," written in

Malone also Drake's " Shakspeare and his Times," part ii. chap. vii. If not in this way, then by bribing or stealing, as many a play since has been appropriated by a rival actor or theatrical manager. Copyright now protects the author: but, in the time of Elizabeth, Shakespeare could neither protect nor prosecute; and the only existing immunity for plays was in their dulness, their unfashionableness, or the watchfulness of the company that owned them. A bookseller, having procured a copy of a play, might enter it at the Stationers' Company; then he could prosecute another bookseller for printing it. But there was nothing to protect a stage-copy from the designs of the publisher. to print certain books by letters-patent did not go behind the printing till a later period.

The right

1605, and published in 1608, we have no means of knowing whether the bookseller, who printed those editions of it with the announcement upon the title page that it was "William Shakespeare His Tragedy," did it upon Shakespeare's authority or not. But as it was not published until three years had elapsed from the period of its composition, although the public was greedy to have the plays that Shakespeare wrote, it is plain that his neglect of them is a mistaken phrase for the theatrical right of property in them; as fanciful as his bitterness over coat-armor that had no heir.

We wonder that Mr. White does not find in rebellious Bolingbroke's speech to Busby and Green (Richard II., iii. 1) the indication of a grudge that Shakespeare must have borne against Providence for defeating his rational desire to propagate gentility it is where Bolingbroke confronts his prisoners with various charges:

"You have

From my own windows torn my household coat,
Razed out my impress, leaving me no sign, -

Save men's opinions, and my living blood, —
To show the world I am a gentleman."

It is by such signs as these that our love and respect secure
Shakespeare from the genteel suggestions of his critic.

ART. IV. -THE DIVINE LIFE AND ITS WAY.

JESUS is reported to have once said to his disciples, "Enter ye in at the strait gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go. in thereat because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." This language has been supposed to teach that the majority of mankind are walking towards hell, where, after death, their portion will be endless torment; while a few are walking towards heaven, where, after death, they will inherit ever

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