To go back a little: in 1587, when he was three-and-twenty, Mary Queen of Scots was executed. In the following year came that mighty victory of England, and her allies the winds and the waters, over the towering pride of the Spanish Armada. Out from the coasts, like the birds from their cliffs to defend their young, flew the little navy, many of the vessels only able to carry a few guns; and fighting, fire-ships and tempest left this island,—
“This precious stone set in the silver sea,”
still a “blessed plot,” with an accumulated obligation to liberty which can only be paid by helping others to be free; and when she utterly forgets which, her doom is sealed, as surely as that of the old empires which passed away in their self-indulgence and wickedness.
When Shakspere was about thirty-two, Sir Walter Raleigh published his glowing account of Guiana, which instantly provided the English mind with an earthly paradise or fairy-land. Raleigh himself seems to have been too full of his own reports for us to be able to suppose that he either invented or disbelieved them; especially when he represents the heavenly country to which, in expectation of his execution, he is looking forward, after the fashion of those regions of the wonderful West:—
“Then the blessed Paths wee’l travel,
Strow’d with Rubies thick as gravel;
Sealings of Diamonds, Saphire floors,
High walls of Coral, and Pearly Bowers.”
Such were some of the influences which widened the region of thought, and excited the productive power, in the minds of the time. After this period there were fewer of such in Shakspere’s life; and if there had been more of them they would have been of less import as to their operation on a mind more fully formed and more capable of choosing its own influences. Let us now give a backward glance at the history of the art which Shakspere chose as the means of easing his own mind of that wealth which, like the gold and the silver, has a moth and rust of its own, except it be kept in use by being sent out for the good of our neighbours.
It was a mighty gain for the language and the people when, in the middle of the fourteenth century, by permission of the Pope, the miracle-plays, most probably hitherto represented in Norman-French, as Mr. Collier supposes, began to be represented in English. Most likely there had been dramatic representations of a sort from the very earliest period of the nation’s history; for, to begin with the lowest form, at what time would there not, for the delight of listeners, have been the imitation of animal sounds, such as the drama of the conversation between an attacking poodle and a fiercely repellent puss? Through innumerable gradations of childhood would the art grow before it attained the first formal embodiment in such plays as those, so-called, of miracles, consisting just of Scripture stories, both canonical and apocryphal, dramatized after the rudest fashion. Regarded from the height which the art had reached two hundred and fifty years after, “how dwarfed a growth of cold and night” do these miracle-plays show themselves! But at a time when there was no printing, little preaching, and Latin prayers, we cannot help thinking that, grotesque and ill-imagined as they are, they must have been of unspeakable value for the instruction of a people whose spiritual digestion was not of a sort to be injured by the presence of a quite abnormal quantity of husk and saw-dust in their food. And occasionally we find verses of true poetic feeling, such as the following, in “The Fall of Man:”—
Deus. Adam, that with myn handys I made,
Where art thou now? What hast thou wrought?
Adam. A! lord, for synne oure floures do ffade,
I here thi voys, but I se the nought;
implying that the separation between God and man, although it had destroyed the beatific vision, was not yet so complete as to make the creature deaf to the voice of his Maker. Nor are the words of Eve, with which she begs her husband, in her shame and remorse, to strangle her, odd and quaint as they are, without an almost overpowering pathos:—
“Now stomble we on stalk and ston;
My wyt awey is fro me gon:
Wrythe on to my necke bon
With, hardnesse of thin honde.”