on horseback. He who rides roan Barbary[1] gets the plaudits of the multitude; and Shakespeare’s voice can generally be heard among the rest, crying with quite old-fashioned vehemence: ‘Le Roi est mort; Vive le Roi!’ Shakespeare’s kings, it has been said, are always kingly; and so they are in the old Plantagenet sense. They go to bed with their crowns on, and sleep with the sceptre under their pillow. They brandish swords and throw down warders, and make polished speeches, which, in a surprising number of the examples, lack moral or psychological sincerity.
Shakespeare’s loyalty was always that of the Tory country-dweller. No length of years in London, no number of performances at court, sufficed to obliterate the country boy’s impression of the vague exotic splendor of the crown. His is not the personal devotion of the cavalier to Charles, nor the imperial ardor of such typical Elizabethans as Spenser and Ralegh, It is rather the old feudal attitude of the Wars of the Roses, the attitude of the Yorkist who would have fought for the crown of England though he found it on a thistle bush. There is every reason for believing that Shakespeare was quite satisfied with the de facto principle of sovereignty which Prince Hal expounds to his father:
You won it, wore it, kept it, gave it me.
Then plain and right must my possession be.’[2]
Perhaps it is not altogether an accident that in Shakespeare’s biography the careless continuators of the old feudal England—Southampton and Essex and Pembroke—mean a great deal, and the purveyors of
- ↑ Richard II, V. v. 76–94.
- ↑ 2 Henry IV, IV. v. 219 ff.
