ÆNEAS’ TALE TO DIDO.
Shakespeare, through the person of Hamlet, shows his entire sympathy and love for all things dramatic. Directly the players enter he heartily welcomes them, throws off for a time all thoughts of melancholy, and appears in his true character as a noble prince, scholar and gentleman. Evidently Hamlet had not seen these players for a long time; for what cause he had abstained from the theatre he does not state. In the interval the chief actor had grown old, and was bearded. The young lady alluded to is the boy actor who had grown at least many inches since Hamlet last saw him; in fact, by the altitude of chopine, this last object was a kind of heel attached to a shoe or boot, measuring a good height, sometimes as much as eighteen inches. The ladies of Venice were chiefly addicted to this fashion at the end of the sixteenth century, being much ridiculed for so doing, perhaps to the same extent as the ladies of our period when the hobbled skirt was introduced. The fashion of wearing a chopine did not extend as far as this country, although Walter Scott introduces the custom in his novel of the Fortunes of Nigel. The allusion to the lady’s voice being cracked within the ring, refers to the boy changing his voice from the boy to the young man’s stage. There was a ring on the coin of the realm within which the sovereign’s head was placed; if the crack extended from the edge beyond the ring, the coin was rendered unfit for currency.
“One speech in it I chiefly loved, ’twas Æneas’ tale to Dido.” Should we consider this play which Shakespeare so admirably criticises as an imaginary composition or one by a living author? I think, after reading Marlowe and Nash’s drama, entitled, “Dido, Queen of Carthage,” there can exist no doubt that Shakespeare was criticising this play, and he certainly moulded the piece he chose for recitation on this production. If any conclusion can be drawn from this piece of criticism, one conclusion is certain, that Shakespeare himself admired the classical drama, and if he had composed plays only for the study they would have been written more in conformity with classical methods. Having a mixed audience he was obliged to flavour his plays with savoury matter, what we should call spicy bits, for seeking the suffrage of the groundlings, and on some occasions treated these matters in no very delicate way according to our present notions. Shakespeare used the big brush, and laid it on pretty thick, proving the truth of Pope’s couplet:
“For gain, not glory, winged his wordy flight
And grew immortal in his own despite.”
Many critics have taken this speech as being ironical, or a burlesque on the old play, but there would have been no point in making Hamlet praise the piece so extravagantly. I think the critics who favour this theory may this time be dismissed with a caution, but should they offend in the same manner again they will be hardly dealt with. I regret seeing Professor Gollancz’s name in the list.
Shakespeare refers to the actors as the abstract and brief chronicles of the time. The Shakesperean canon comprises thirty-seven plays, not one of which, with the single exception of “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” deals with contemporary events, therefore, by his own confession, we owe Shakespeare little for pourtraying the chronicles of the time. Had Shakespeare strictly adhered to the laws of the drama this censure might have more force, but in all the plays, whether Roman, English of bygone centuries, or Italian, characters and scenes are laid before our admiring eyes, bearing always a substratum of pure contemporary English manners, for which we must be ever thankful.
The same might be said of all the Elizabethan dramatists with but few exceptions. Perhaps Shakespeare was looking ahead, prophesying the time when the playwright would record the events of his day, as in our own time the happenings of the hour are fully recorded, vindicating the phrase voiced by the poet as “holding the mirror up to nature”:
That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,