friars, masses, vigils, extreme unction, and purgatory. It came natural to him to invoke angels and ministers of grace, to swear by Our Lady and Saint Patrick.
Nor can we doubt, rare as are the authentic expressions of Shakespeare’s personal feeling in his works, that the poet was himself fully aware of the homely and conservative cast of all his thinking. Readers have always, and rightly, recognized the inner voice of the dramatist’s own conviction in the words with which Biron abjures
Three-pil’d hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical.’
‘I do forswear them,’ says Biron, ‘and I here protest . . .
The volatile Biron, it is probable, found the vow too hard to keep; but for Shakespeare, who here speaks through him, russet and kersey were to the end the only wear. In his seventy-sixth Sonnet he expresses, with a candid clarity impossible to discount, his realization of the intellectual gulf which separated him from the peacock race of the true Elizabethans:
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?’
- ↑ Love’s Labour’s Lost, V. ii. 407 ff.
