The Sonnets must not occupy us further; and I will not dwell on the indications they afford that Shakespeare sometimes felt bitterly both the social inferiority of his position as an actor,[21] and its influence on his own character; or that (as we have already conjectured) he may sometimes have played the fool in society, sometimes felt weary of life, and often was over-tired by work. It is time to pass on to a few hesitating conjectures about what may be called his tastes.
Some passages of his about music have become household words. It is not downright impossible that, like Bottom, having only a reasonable good ear, he liked best the tongs and the bones; that he wondered, with Benedick, how sheeps-guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies; and that he wrote the famous lines in the Merchant of Venice and in Twelfth Night from mere observation and imagination. But it is futile to deal with scepticism run well-nigh mad, and certainly inaccessible to argument from the cases of poets whose tastes are matter of knowledge. Assuming therefore that Shakespeare was fond of music, I may draw attention to two points. Almost always he speaks of music as having a softening, tranquillising, or pensive influence. It lulls killing care and grief of heart to sleep. It soothes the sick and weary, and even makes them drowsy. Hamlet calls for it in his hysterical excitement after the success of the play scene. When it is hoped that Lear’s long sleep will have carried his madness away, music is played as he awakes, apparently to increase the desired ‘temperance.’ It harmonises with the still and moon-lit night, and the dreamy happiness of newly-wedded lovers. Almost all the rare allusions to lively or exciting music, apart from dancing, refer, I believe, to ‘the lofty instruments of war.’ These facts would almost certainly have a personal significance if Shakespeare were a more modern poet. Whether they have any, or have much, in an Elizabethan I do not venture to judge.
The second point is diminutive, but it may be connected with the first. The Duke in Measure for Measure observes that music often has
| a charm To make bad good and good provoke to harm. |
If we ask how it should provoke good to harm, we may recall what was said (p. 326) of the weaknesses of some poetic natures, and that no one speaks more feelingly of music than Orsino; further, how he refers to music as ‘the food of love,’ and who it is that almost repeats the phrase.
| Give me some music: music, moody food Of us that trade in love: |
—the words are Cleopatra’s.[22] Did Shakespeare as he wrote them remember, I wonder, the dark lady to whose music he had listened (Sonnet 128)?
We should be greatly surprised to find in Shakespeare signs of the nineteenth century feeling for mountain scenery, but we can no more doubt that within certain limits he was sensitive to the beauty of nature than that he was fond of music.[23] The only question is whether we can guess at any preferences here. It is probably inevitable that the flowers most often mentioned should be the rose and the lily;[24] but hardly that the violet should come next and not far behind, and that the fragrance of the violet should be spoken of more often even than that of the rose, and, it seems, with special affection. This may be a fancy, and it will be thought a sentimental fancy too; but poets, like other people, may have favourite flowers; that of Keats, we happen to know, was the violet.
Again, if we may draw any conclusion from the frequency and the character of the allusions, the lark held for Shakespeare the place of honour among birds; and the lines,
| Hark! hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings, And Phœbus gins arise, |