The People for Whom Shakespeare Wrote

by Charles Dudley Warner

M. Taine heightens this picture in generalizations splashed with innumerable blood-red details of English life and character. The English is the most warlike race in Europe, most redoubtable in battle, most impatient of slavery. "English savages" is what Cellini calls them; and the great shins of beef with which they fill themselves nourish the force and ferocity of their instincts. To harden them thoroughly, institutions work in the same groove as nature. The nation is armed. Every man is a soldier, bound to have arms according to his condition, to exercise himself on Sundays and holidays. The State resembles an army; punishments must inspire terror; the idea of war is ever present. Such instincts, such a history, raises before them with tragic severity the idea of life; death is at hand, wounds, blood, tortures. The fine purple cloaks, the holiday garments, elsewhere signs of gayety of mind, are stained with blood and bordered with black. Throughout a stern discipline, the axe ready for every suspicion of treason; "great men, bishops, a chancellor, princes, the king's relations, queens, a protector kneeling in the straw, sprinkled the Tower with their blood; one after the other they marched past, stretched out their necks; the Duke of Buckingham, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard, the Earl of Surrey, Admiral Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, Lady Jane Grey and her husband, the Duke of Northumberland, the Earl of Essex, all on the throne, or on the steps of the throne, in the highest ranks of honor, beauty, youth, genius; of the bright procession nothing is left but senseless trunks, marred by the tender mercies of the executioner."

The gibbet stands by the highways, heads of traitors and criminals grin on the city gates. Mournful legends multiply, church-yard ghosts, walking spirits. In the evening, before bedtime, in the vast country houses, in the poor cottages, people talk of the coach which is seen drawn by headless horses, with headless postilions and coachmen. All this, with unbounded luxury, unbridled debauchery, gloom, and revelry hand in hand. "A threatening and sombre fog veils their mind like their sky, and joy, like the sun, pierces through it and upon them strongly and at intervals." All this riot of passion and frenzy of vigorous life, this madness and sorrow, in which life is a phantom and destiny drives so remorselessly, Taine finds on the stage and in the literature of the period.

To do him justice, he finds something else, something that might give him a hint of the innate soundness of English life in its thousands of sweet homes, something of that great force of moral stability, in the midst of all violence and excess of passion and performance, which makes a nation noble. "Opposed to this band of tragic figures," which M. Taine arrays from the dramas, "with their contorted features, brazen fronts, combative attitudes, is a troop (he says) of timid figures, tender before everything, the most graceful and love-worthy whom it has been given to man to depict. In Shakespeare you will meet them in Miranda, Juliet, Desdemona, Virginia, Ophelia, Cordelia, Imogen; but they abound also in the others; and it is a characteristic of the race to have furnished them, as it is of the drama to have represented them. By a singular coincidence the women are more of women, the men more of men, here than elsewhere. The two natures go to its extreme—in the one to boldness, the spirit of enterprise and resistance, the warlike, imperious, and unpolished character; in the other to sweetness, devotion, patience, inextinguishable affection (hence the happiness and strength of the marriage tie), a thing unknown in distant lands, and in France especially a woman here gives herself without drawing back, and places her glory and duty in obedience, forgiveness, adoration, wishing, and pretending only to be melted and absorbed daily deeper and deeper in him whom she has freely and forever chosen." This is an old German instinct. The soul in this race is at once primitive and serious. Women are disposed to follow the noble dream called duty. "Thus, supported by innocence and conscience, they introduce into love a profound and upright sentiment, abjure coquetry, vanity, and flirtation; they do not lie, they are not affected. When they love they are not tasting a forbidden fruit, but are binding themselves for their whole life. Thus understood, love becomes almost a holy thing; the spectator no longer wishes to be malicious or to jest; women do not think of their own happiness, but of that of the loved ones; they aim not at pleasure, but at devotion."

Thus far M. Taine's brilliant antitheses—the most fascinating and most dangerous model for a young writer. But we are indebted to him for a most suggestive study of the period. His astonishment, the astonishment of the Gallic mind, at what he finds, is a measure of the difference in the literature of the two races as an expression of their life. It was natural that he should somewhat exaggerate what he regards as the source of this expression, leaving out of view, as he does, certain great forces and currents which an outside observer cannot feel as the race itself feels. We look, indeed, for the local color of this English literature in the manners and habits of the times, traits of which Taine has so skillfully made a mosaic from Harrison, Stubbes, Stowe, Holinshed, and the pages of Reed and Drake; but we look for that which made it something more than a mirror of contemporary manners, vices, and virtues, made it representative of universal men, to other causes and forces-such as the Reformation, the immense stir, energy, and ambition of the age (the result of invention and discovery), newly awakened to the sense that there was a world to be won and made tributary; that England, and, above all places on the globe at that moment, London, was the centre of a display of energy and adventure such as has been scarcely paralleled in history. And underneath it all was the play of an uneasy, protesting democracy, eager to express itself in adventure, by changing its condition, in the joy of living and overcoming, and in literature, with small regard for tradition or the unities.

When Shakespeare came up to London with his first poems in his pocket, the town was so great and full of marvels, and luxury, and entertainment, as to excite the astonishment of continental visitors. It swarmed with soldiers, adventurers, sailors who were familiar with all seas and every port, men with projects, men with marvelous tales. It teemed with schemes of colonization, plans of amassing wealth by trade, by commerce, by planting, mining, fishing, and by the quick eye and the strong hand. Swaggering in the coffee-houses and ruffling it in the streets were the men who had sailed with Frobisher and Drake and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Hawkins, and Sir Richard Granville; had perhaps witnessed the heroic death of Sir Philip Sidney, at Zutphen; had served with Raleigh in Anjou, Picardy, Languedoc, in the Netherlands, in the Irish civil war; had taken part in the dispersion of the Spanish Armada, and in the bombardment of Cadiz; had filled their cups to the union of Scotland with England; had suffered shipwreck on the Barbary Coast, or had, by the fortune of war, felt the grip of the Spanish Inquisition; who could tell tales of the marvels seen in new-found America and the Indies, and, perhaps, like Captain John Smith, could mingle stories of the naive simplicity of the natives beyond the Atlantic, with charming narratives of the wars in Hungary, the beauties of the seraglio of the Grand Turk, and the barbaric pomp of the Khan of Tartary. There were those in the streets who would see Raleigh go to the block on the scaffold in Old Palace Yard, who would fight against King Charles on the fields of Newbury or Naseby, Kineton or Marston Moor, and perchance see the exit of Charles himself from another scaffold erected over against the Banqueting House.

Although London at the accession of James I.(1603) had only about one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants—the population of England then numbering about five million—it was so full of life and activity that Frederick, Duke of Wurtemberg, who saw it a few years before, in 1592, was impressed with it as a large, excellent, and mighty city of business, crowded with people buying and selling merchandise, and trading in almost every corner of the world, a very populous city, so that one can scarcely pass along the streets on account of the throng; the inhabitants, he says, are magnificently appareled, extremely proud and overbearing, who scoff and laugh at foreigners, and no one dare oppose them lest the street boys and apprentices collect together in immense crowds and strike to right and left unmercifully without regard to persons.

There prevailed an insatiable curiosity for seeing strange sights and hearing strange adventures, with an eager desire for visiting foreign countries, which Shakespeare and all the play-writers satirize. Conversation turned upon the wonderful discoveries of travelers, whose voyages to the New World occupied much of the public attention. The exaggeration which from love of importance inflated the narratives, the poets also take note of. There was also a universal taste for hazard in money as well as in travel, for putting it out on risks at exorbitant interest, and the habit of gaming reached prodigious excess. The passion for sudden wealth was fired by the success of the sea-rovers, news of which inflamed the imagination. Samuel Kiechel, a merchant of Ulm, who was in London in 1585, records that, "news arrived of a Spanish ship captured by Drake, in which it was said there were two millions of uncoined gold and silver in ingots, fifty thousand crowns in coined reals, seven thousand hides, four chests of pearls, each containing two bushels, and some sacks of cochineal—the whole valued at twenty-five barrels of gold; it was said to be one year and a half's tribute from Peru."

The passion for travel was at such a height that those who were unable to accomplish distant journeys, but had only crossed over into France and Italy, gave themselves great airs on their return. "Farewell, monsieur traveler," says Shakespeare; "look, you lisp, and wear strange suits; disable all the benefits of your own country; be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making you that countenance you are, or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola." The Londoners dearly loved gossip, and indulged in exaggeration of speech and high-flown compliment. One gallant says to another: "O, signior, the star that governs my life is contentment; give me leave to interre myself in your arms."—"Not so, sir, it is too unworthy an enclosure to contain such preciousness!"

Dancing was the daily occupation rather than the amusement at court and elsewhere, and the names of dances exceeded the list of the virtues—such as the French brawl, the pavon, the measure, the canary, and many under the general titles of corantees, jigs, galliards, and fancies. At the dinner and ball given by James I. to Juan Fernandez de Velasco, Constable of Castile, in 1604, fifty ladies of honor, very elegantly dressed and extremely beautiful, danced with the noblemen and gentlemen. Prince Henry danced a galliard with a lady, "with much sprightliness and modesty, cutting several capers in the course of the dance"; the Earl of Southampton led out the queen, and with three other couples danced a brando, and so on, the Spanish visitors looking on. When Elizabeth was old and had a wrinkled face and black teeth, she was one day discovered practicing the dance step alone, to the sound of a fiddle, determined to keep up to the last the limberness and agility necessary to impress foreign ambassadors with her grace and youth. There was one custom, however, that may have made dancing a labor of love: it was considered ill manners for the gentleman not to kiss his partner. Indeed, in all households and in all ranks of society the guest was expected to salute thus all the ladies a custom which the grave Erasmus, who was in England in the reign of Henry VIII., found not disagreeable.

Magnificence of display went hand in hand with a taste for cruel and barbarous amusements. At this same dinner to the Constable of Castile, the two buffets of the king and queen in the audience-chamber, where the banquet was held, were loaded with plate of exquisite workmanship, rich vessels of gold, agate, and other precious stones. The constable drank to the king the health of the queen from the lid of a cup of agate of extraordinary beauty and richness, set with diamonds and rubies, praying his majesty would condescend to drink the toast from the cup, which he did accordingly, and then the constable directed that the cup should remain in his majesty's buffet. The constable also drank to the queen the health of the king from a very beautiful dragon-shaped cup of crystal garnished with gold, drinking from the cover, and the queen, standing up, gave the pledge from the cup itself, and then the constable ordered that the cup should remain in the queen's buffet.