THE PERSONALITY OF SHAKESPEARE
The bard of Avon, most successful perhaps of all the poets of the world, owed much of his success to his care in rendering unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, while laying up his finest treasures for generations yet unborn. From his own age Shakespeare asked and obtained ‘a fellowship in a cry of players,’ with the solid emoluments thereto appertaining. He obtained his ease at the Boar’s Head, Mermaid, and the gentle hostelries along the Stratford road. He acquired the arms and title of a gentleman, and ultimately broad meadow lands in Warwickshire, with the spacious leisure of New Place. Willingly he relinquished the regal immortality of Westminster, by the side of Chaucer, Spenser, and Ben Jonson, for undisturbed repose in the chancel of his provincial church.
Once in early life Shakespeare vouchsafed a scant dozen lines[1] of compliment to the Virgin Queen; twice, likewise at the opening of his career, he deigned to dedicate a poem to a noble patron. This is almost the whole extent of Shakespeare’s literary concession to his age.[2] The characters of his plays he selected, with what almost seems to us a curious perversity, from Veronese and Frenchmen, Romans, Greeks, Jews, Danes, Moors, and ancient Britons—from every type of people but the subjects of his queen. Of the English of the past he is an unrivaled delineator; of the Englishmen of his own time he hardly tells us directly
- ↑ Midsummer Night’s Dream, II. i. 155–164.
- ↑ The Sonnets contain, perhaps, a further tribute to Southampton. In Henry V (Act V, Chorus) he flatters Essex; in Macbeth he lauds the progeny of Banquo and offers a testimonial (IV. iii.) to James I’s quackery regarding the ‘King’s evil’; in The Merry Wives of Windsor he may consciously have written himself down to the Queen’s taste.
