Part 27 (2/2)

_Leatherhead_ A pimp and a scab!

I say, between you you have both but one drab

_Pythias and Daether to breakfast to Hero

_Leatherhead_ Thus, gentles, you perceive without any denial 'Twixt Damon and Pythias here friendshi+p's true trial”

Rare Ben Jonson would have been delighted to set forth the viler charge if it had ever been whispered

Then again, it seems to me certain that if Shakespeare had been the sort of man his accusers say he was, he would have betrayed hi boys then played the girls'

parts on the stage Surely if Shakespeare had had any leaning that e should have found again and again aiven to soirls; but not one The temptation was there; the provocation was there, incessant and prolonged for twenty-five years, and yet, to e, Shakespeare has never used one word that estive and lewd speech

Luckily, however, there is stronger proof of Shakespeare's innocence than even his conde, that if all the arguer than they are, this proof would outweigh theht Nor should it be supposed, because I have only ainst, that I do not know all those that can be urged on either side I have confinedthem, their utter weakness must be admitted by every one who can read Shakespeare, by every one who understands his impulsive sensitiveness, and the facility hich affectionate expressions caotten that while the sonnets were being written he was in rivalry with Chapman for this very patron's favour, and this rivalry alone would explain a good deal of the fervour, or, should I say, the affected fervour he put into the first series of sonnets; but now for the decisive and convincing argument for Shakespeare's innocence

Let us first ask ourselves how it is that real passion betrays itself and proves its force Surely it is by its continuance; by its effect upon the life later I have assumed, or inferred, asfor Herbert was chiefly snobbish, and was deepened by the selfish hope that he would find in him a patron even more powerful and more liberally disposed than Lord Southareat deal for his companionshi+p and poetical advice; for Herbert was by way of being a poet himself If my view is correct, after Shakespeare lost Lord Herbert's affection, we should expect to hear hiratitude, and that is just what Lord Herbert left in him, bitterness and contempt Never one word in all his works to show that the loss of this youth's affection touched him more nearly As we have seen, he cannot keep the incident out of his plays Again and again he drags it in; but in none of these dra kindness towards the betrayer And as soon as the incident was past and done with, as soon as the three or four years' companionshi+p with Lord Herbert was at an end, not one word ain Shakespeare rails atreat poas, indeed, made Lord Chamberlain, and set above all the players, so that he could have advanced Shakespeare as he pleased with a word: with a word could have her post He did not help hiave books every Christift to Shakespeare, though evidently from the dedication to him of the first folio, he reratitude is what Shakespeare found in Lord Peratitude is what he complains of in him What a different effect the loss of Mary Fitton had upon Shakespeare Just consider what the plays teach us when the sonnet-story is finished The youth vanishes; no reader can find a trace of him, or even an allusion to him But the woedy after tragedy She flath she inspires perhaps his greatest drarace of him who is ”a strumpet's fool,” the shame of him who has become ”the bellows and the fan to cool a harlot's lust”

The passion for Mary Fitton was the passion of Shakespeare's whole life

The adoration of her, and the insane desire of her, can be seen in every play he wrote from 1597 to 1608 After he lost her, he went back to her; but the wound of her frailty cankered and took on proud flesh in him, and tortured hith he won to peace, after ten years, it was the peace of exhaustion His love for his ”gipsy-wanton” burned him out, as one is burnt to ashes at the stake, and his passion only ended with his life

There is no room for doubt in my mind, no faintest suspicion Hallam and Heine, and all the cry of critics, are mistaken in this matter

Shakespeare adreat things froed him inexorably as a mean traitor, ”a stealer” who had betrayed ”a twofold trust”; and later, cursed hihts of bloody revenge, as we shall soon see in ”Hamlet” and ”Othello,” and then dropped hih to know that Shakespeare, the sweetest spirit and finest raded hiate Herbert as has given occasion for h, I say, to know that Shakespeare could play flunkey to this extent; but after all, that is the worst that can be urged against him, and it is so much better than men have been led to believe that there e

CHAPTER VI THE FIRST-FRUIT OF THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE: BRUTUS

The play of ”Julius Caesar” ritten about 1600 or 1601 As ”Twelfth Night” was the last of the golden coedies, and bears -eyed confidence in life and joy in living are dying, if not dead ”Julius Caesar” is the first outcome of disillusion Before it ritten Shakespeare had been deceived by his mistress, betrayed by his friend; his eyes had been opened to the fraud and falsehood of life; but, like one who has just been operated on for cataract, he still sees realities as through a mist, dimly He meets the shock of traitorous betrayal as we should have expected Valentine or Antonio or Orsino to , instead of steeling his heart and drying up his sympathies, as it does with ive hiel, Pity” He will not believe that his bitter experience is universal; in spite of Herbert's betrayal, he still has the courage to declare his belief in the existence of the ideal At the very last his defeated Brutus cries:

”My heart doth joy that yet in all my life I found no man but he was true to me”

The pathos of this attempt still to believe in man and man's truth is over the whole play But the belief was fated to disappear No man who lives in the world can boast of loyalty as Brutus did; even Jesus had a Judas a the Twelve But when Shakespeare wrote ”Julius Caesar” he still tried to believe, and this gives the play an iin to consider the character of Brutus I should like to draw attention to three passages which place Brutus between the melancholy Jaques of ”As You Like It,” whoseHaive h Cleanse the foul body of the infected world, If they will patiently receive my medicine”

This is the view of early manhood which does not doubt its power to cure all the evils which afflict mortality Then coives expression:

”Till then, my noble friend, chew upon this; Brutus had rather be a villager Than to repute himself a son of Rome Under these hard conditions as this time Is like to lay upon us”

And later still, and still more bitter, Hamlet's:

”The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!”

But Shakespeare is a meliorist even in Haht

The likenesses between Brutus and Hamlet are so marked that even the coerates the siedies of thought rather than of passion; both present in their chief characters the spectacle of noble natures which fail through soh crime; upon Brutus as upon Hamlet a burden is laid which he is not able to bear; neither Brutus nor Haerous and difficult affairs” Much of this is Professor Dowden's view and not Shakespeare's When Shakespeare wrote ”Julius Caesar” he had not reached that stage in self-understanding when he becaht rather than of action, and that the two ideals tend to exclude each other In the contest at Philippi Brutus and his in the day; it is the defeat of Cassius which brings about the ruin; Shakespeare evidently intended to depict Brutus as well ”fitted for action”

So that Shakespeare identified himself with Brutus, who failed, rather than with Caesar, who succeeded But even before he hirief in his love and trust, Shakespeare had always treated the failures with peculiar sy Henry VI to Richard III, and Richard II to proud Bolingbroke And after his agony of disillusion, all his heroes are failures for years and years: Brutus, Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Troilus, Antony, and Timon--all fail as he himself had failed