Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay.[26]
The poet’s feeling of pity descends even to small and fragile forms of living things, to which most people are indifferent or even hostile. Perhaps he may sometimes have credited these feeble creatures with greater sensitiveness to pain than a modern naturalist would allow, as where Isabella in Measure for Measure tells her brother that
The poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.[27]
Pity for the humblest Creatures
Shakespeare elsewhere alludes to our prevalent insensibility towards the insect world, from our youth upward.
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.[28]
In maturer life men will do “a thousand dreadful things as willingly as one would kill a fly.”[29] But the poet’s pity extended even to the fly. In a spirited picture of a superb charger he tells how the animal proudly “stamps and bites the poor flies in his fume.”[30] The most detailed and remarkable expression of this commiseration in the whole of Shakespeare’s works, however, is to be found in the unpleasing tragedy of Titus Andronicus, which, though printed among his dramas, is doubtless mainly the work of another writer. Yet it contains passages of great power and beauty which are not unworthy of Shakespeare and probably came from his pen. Among these passages I would include the singular scene in which Titus is sitting at table with his brother Marcus, who strikes the dish with his knife, whereupon the following dialogue ensues: