1904.
[1] Unquestionably it holds in a considerable degree of Browning, who in At the Mermaid and House wrote as though he imagined that neither his own work nor Shakespeare’s betrayed anything of the inner man. But if we are to criticise those two poems as arguments, we must say that they involve two hopelessly false assumptions, that we have to choose between a self-revelation like Byron’s and no self-revelation at all, and that the relation between a poet and his work is like that between the inside and the outside of a house.
[2] Almost all Shakespearean criticism, of course, contains something bearing on our subject; but I have a practical reason for mentioning in particular Mr. Frank Harris’s articles in the Saturday Review for 1898. A good many of Mr. Harris’s views I cannot share, and I had arrived at almost all the ideas expressed in the lecture (except some on the Sonnets question) before reading his papers. But I found in them also valuable ideas which were quite new to me and would probably be so to many readers. It is a great pity that the articles are not collected and published in a book. [Mr. Harris has published, in The Man Shakespeare, the substance of the articles, and also matter which, in my judgment, has much less value.]
[3] He is apologising for an attack made on Shakespeare in a pamphlet of which he was the publisher and Greene the writer.
[4] It was said of him, indeed, in his lifetime that, had he not played some kingly parts in sport (i.e. on the stage), he would have been a companion for a king.
[5] Nor, vice versa, does the possession of these latter qualities at all imply, as some writers seem to assume, the absence of the former or of gentleness.
[6] Fuller may be handing down a tradition, but it is not safe to assume this. His comparison, on the other hand, of Shakespeare and Jonson, in their wit combats, to an English man-of-war and a Spanish great galleon, reads as if his own happy fancy were operating on the reports, direct or indirect, of eye-witnesses.
[7] See, for example, Act IV. Sc. v., to which I know no parallel in the later tragedies.
[8] I allude to Sonnet 110, Mr. Beeching’s note on which seems to be unquestionably right: ‘There is no reference to the poet’s profession of player. The sonnet gives the confession of a favourite of society.’ This applies, I think, to the whole group of sonnets (it begins with 107) in which the poet excuses his neglect of his friend, though there are also references to his profession and its effect on his nature and his reputation. (By a slip Mr. Beeching makes the neglect last for three years.)