There are worse faults to be laid to his account than lechery and extravagance. Every one who has read his works with any care must admit that Shakespeare was a snob of the purest English water. Aristocratic tastes were natural to him; inherent, indeed, in the delicate sensitiveness of his beauty-loving temperament; but he desired the outward and visible signs of gentility as much as any podgy millionaire of our time, and stooped as low to get them as man could stoop. In 1596, his young son, Hamnet, died at Stratford, and was buried on 11th August in the parish church. This event called Shakespeare back to his village, and while he was there he most probably paid his father's debts, and certainly tried to acquire for himself and his successors the position of gentlefolk. He induced his father to make application to the College of Heralds for a coat of arms, on the ground not only that his father was a man of substance, but that he had also married into a “worshipful” family. The draft grant of arms was not executed at the time. It may have been that the father's pecuniary position became known to the College, or perhaps the profession of the son created difficulties; but in any case nothing was done for some time. In 1597, however, the Earl of Essex became Earl Marshal and Chief of the Heralds' College, and the scholar and antiquary, William Camden, joined the College as Clarenceux King of Arms. Shakespeare must have been known to the Earl of Essex, who was an intimate friend of the Earl of Southampton; he was indeed almost certainly a friend and admirer of Essex. The Shakespeares' second application to be admitted to the status of gentlefolk took a new form. They asserted roundly that the coat as set out in the draft of 1596 had been assigned to John Shakespeare while he was bailiff, and the heralds were asked to give him a “recognition” of it. At the same time John Shakespeare asked for permission to quarter on his “ancient coat of arms” that of the Ardens of Wilmscote, his wife's family. But this was going too far, even for a friend of Essex. To grant such a request might have got the College into trouble with the influential Warwickshire family of Arden, and so it was refused; but the grant was “recognized,” and Shakespeare's peculiar ambition was satisfied.
Every single incident in his life bears out what we have learned from his works. In all his writings he praises lords and gentlemen, and runs down the citizens and common people, and in his life he spent some years, a good deal of trouble, and many impudent lies in getting for his father a grant of arms and recognition as a gentleman—a very pitiful ambition, but peculiarly English. Shakespeare, one fancies, was a gentleman by nature, and a good deal more.
But his snobbishness had other worse results. Partly because of it he never got to know the middle classes in England. True, even in his time they were excessively Puritanical, which quality hedged them off, so to speak, from the playwright-poet. With his usual gentleness or timidity, Shakespeare never tells us directly what he thought of the Puritans, but his half-averted, contemptuous glance at them in passing, is very significant. Angelo, the would-be Puritan ruler, was a “false seemer,” Malvolio was a “chough.” The peculiar virtues of the English middle class, its courage and sheepishness; its good conduct and respect for duties; its religious sense and cocksure narrow-mindedness, held no attraction for Shakespeare, and, armoured in snobbishness, he utterly missed what a knowledge of the middle classes might have given him.
Let us take one instance of his loss. Though he lived in an age of fanaticism, he never drew a fanatic or reformer, never conceived a man as swimming against the stream of his time. He had but a vague conception of the few spirits in each age who lead humanity to new and higher ideals; he could not understand a Christ or a Mahomet, and it seems as if he took but small interest in Jeanne d'Arc, the noblest being that came within the ken of his art. For even if we admit that he did not write the first part of “Henry VI.,” it is certain that it passed through his hands, and that in his youth, at any rate, he saw nothing to correct in that vile and stupid libel on the greatest of women. Even the English fanatic escaped his intelligence; his Jack Cade, as I have already noticed, is a wretched caricature; no Cade moves his fellows save by appealing to the best in them, to their sense of justice, or what they take for justice. The Cade who will wheedle men for his own gross ambitions may make a few dupes, but not thousands of devoted followers. These elementary truths Shakespeare never understood. Yet how much greater he would have been had he understood them; had he studied even one Puritan lovingly and depicted him sympathetically. For the fanatic is one of the hinges which swing the door of the modern world. Shakespeare's “universal sympathy”—to quote Coleridge—did not include the plainly-clad tub-thumper who dared to accuse him to his face of serving the Babylonish Whore. Shakespeare sneered at the Puritan instead of studying him; with the result that he belongs rather to the Renaissance than to the modern world, in spite even of his Hamlet. The best of a Wordsworth or a Turgenief is outside him; he would never have understood a Marianna or a Bazarof, and the noble faith of the sonnet to “Toussaint l'Ouverture” was quite beyond him. He could never have written:
“Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee, air, earth and skies;
There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind.”
It is time to speak of him frankly; he was gentle, and witty; gay, and sweet-mannered, very studious, too, and fair of mind; but at the same time he was weak in body and irresolute, hasty and wordy, and took habitually the easiest way out of difficulties; he was ill-endowed in the virile virtues and virile vices. When he showed arrogance it was always of intellect and not of character; he was a parasite by nature. But none of these faults would have brought him to ruin; he was snared again in full manhood by his master-quality, his overpowering sensuality, and thrown in the mire.
CHAPTER XV. SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE—continued
Shakespeare's life seems to fall sharply into two halves. Till he met Mistress Fitton, about 1597, he must have been happy and well content, I think, in spite of his deep underlying melancholy. According to my reckoning he had been in London about ten years, and no man has ever done so much in the time and been so successful even as the world counts success. He had not only written the early poems and the early plays, but in the last three or four years half-a-dozen masterpieces: “A Midsummer's Night's Dream,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Richard II.,” “King John,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “The Two Parts of Henry IV.” At thirty-three he was already the greatest poet and dramatist of whom Time holds any record.
Southampton's bounty had given him ease, and allowed him to discharge his father's debts, and place his dearly loved mother in a position of comfort in the best house in Stratford.