“Would you escape them, Master Shakespeare, these inimitable children of your fancy?”
“Yes, your grace, I would on occasion; I would almost yield life itself to do so.”
The Queen was astonished by the almost passionate nature of the answer. This man was no shallow deviser of masques to speed a summer’s day, but one to whom existence was an almost intolerable burden, which admitted of very little alleviation. And he was one who read its riddles with the eyes of a seer.
“I begin to take your meaning, Master Shakespeare,” said the Queen. “I had supposed that when these children of your fancy laughed and made merry, you also rejoiced. But I had forgotten that even in these plays of yours the sadness outweighs the mirth as is the case with life itself, whereby a double burden is laid upon the endurance of their creator.”
“Yes, your grace, that is indeed true. And yet that is not the full measure of a poet’s unhappiness.”
“In what does a poet’s unhappiness consist, Master Shakespeare?”
“It consists, your grace, in this. A poet sees too much, feels too much, knows too much. He is stretched perpetually on the rack of his excess. He reads more into life than life itself will hold. Of a most private grief he will make a little song. He will amuse the groundlings with the tale of some deep injury he has suffered in his bones. When he moves the crowd to tears, his fees are paid in blood.”
There was something in the nature of the answer which held the Queen. Good sense was her highest quality, and it was that quality in others which never failed to speak to her. She was captivated by the bearing of this man, in whom she recognized not only the master of his craft, but also what pleased her even more, a mature mind which had much to say to her own acute and worldly wise one.
Indeed, so gratified was the Queen with the demeanor and the mental quality of Mr. William Shakespeare, that, as a signal mark of her favor, he was commanded to sit in her presence. The sovereign was prone to carry her Tudor sense of importance to ridiculous lengths, but there was some subtle instinct lurking within her which sought equality between “the fair vestal throned by the west” and the monarch of an empire infinitely wider than her own.