A few Observations on Shakespeare and his "Merchant of Venice".

BY HENRY A. FRANKLIN.

The task which we have set ourselves is, to show, through the great master's life and writings, in how eminent a degree he exemplified that intimate union of the real with the ideal which 'gives the world assurance of a man'. To shake our puny spear, or if need be break a lance, in opposition to that assertion, great as is the authority that has put it forth, and ready as is the credence that has therefore been attached to it in Germany, that England owes a knowlege of Shakespeare to the Germans. And lastly, to prove by a brief analysis of "The Merchant of Venice', how just and enlightened were the poet's views as to humanity at large; and especially to attempt to free his memory from the blot that might de said to taint it, had he suffered himself to be led by deeprooted prejudice to pander to the popular taste, in casting aspersions upon the Jewish character.

In our attempt to prove so much within so small a compass, we shall not overload our lean text as we go along, with rich contributions from the abundant stores that have been heaped up at the great in-gatherings of an endless host of critics and biographers. The temptation so to do is unusually great, but we resist it, because of the invidiousness of selection from a literature that, to be complete, numbers, in England alone, upwards of 2000 volumes: nor shall we marshal forth an array of authorities at foot, though many have been consulted.

In approaching the life and writings of him whom we consider the greatest poet of all times, we scarcely know which is the most deeply to be regretted, the paucity of reliable information that we possess as regards himself, or the absence of all his original manuscripts. The facts of his life, according to the most scrupulous and conscientious investigations of his biographers, are these.

His infancy merged into childhood, his childhood fleeted into boyhood and youth, and lastly ripened into manhood, amid the sweet scenes of his birth-place, Stratford upon Avon, in Warwickshire, at one of those charming rural spots that abound in the garden of dear old England, so well fitted for the genial development of the divine spirit of contemplation.

John Shakespeare, his father, a respectable burgess of that city, derived at first an easy competence from trade, chiefly that of a wool-stapler, but was later reduced in circumstances. Our poet's mother, Mary Arden, the daughter of a substantial yeoman of a good old English stock, must have imparted to young William that touching tenderness and gentleness of spirit, which is reputed to have formed through life his distinctive characteristic; for when ever was there a man great and good but he had the germs of his better nature implanted by his mother?

and

What would we not give to be able to trace from its first faint beginnings the development of this mighty genius, but all we may conclude with certainty is, that he received his education at the Free School of his native city, upon which was conferred by a royal charter of Edward VI in 1553 the title of The King's New School of Stratford upon Avon'. Here, besides acquiring the 'little Latin less Greek', which his learned friend Ben Jonson reports him to have known, must have been laid at least the groundwork of that wonderful mastery over his native tongne, which enabled him to employ, with a combined sweetness and vigour almost transcending belief, no less than 15,000 words, of which, says Marsh, not more than 500-600 have become obsolete,or changed their signification.

The incidents of his youth are a blank, but how keenly alive his senses must have been to outer impressions, and how industrious in the hoarding of them! There is reason

to conclude, that his father had to recal him from his studies, to aid in his falling trade, certain it is, that the poet made it the aim of his life to retrieve the falling or rather fallen fortunes of the house of Shakespeare, and that he eventually succeeded. Thus, owing his genial disposition doubtless to his own dear mother; his positive knowledge, unattainable by intuition, to the Grammar School, his only alma mater; his intimate acquaintance with the realities of life in all its phases, the great impulse to his creative genius, may be ascribed to that dura mater, or hard mother of the brain, adversity. In 1582, at the early age of 18, he married Aune Hathaway of Shottery, a neighbouring village, by nearly 8 years his senior. The issue of this union, which there is no sufficient reason to conclude to have been otherwise than happy, were Susanna, born in 1583, and Hamnet and Judith, twins, born in 1585, but with the second generation all the poet's lineal descendants became extinct at the death of Elisabeth, daughter of Judith, in 1670. Never indulging in mere day-dreams, but invariably turning to the practical side of life, and labouring on in noble self-dependence, there is scarcely any vocation which he is not reported by imaginative biographers to have pursued, the preponderance of probability being in favour of his having practised as a scrivener, or drudged as an usher. The arguments in favour of other callings are shortsightedly deduced from his familiarity with various terminologies, certainly not taught then as now in public schools, in apparent ignorance of the unlimited capacity of genius to acquire at a glance, nay almost by intuitive perception, what assiduous mediocrity needs years of study for. Our poet's very foibles took their origin in the vigorous constitution of his disposition, and doubtless to his ill-considered forays upon Sir Thomas Lucy's preserves at Charlecote, may be attributed that ever memorable Hegira to the great metropolis, which led to his becoming the great prophet and teacher of the world at large. That Shakespeare really indulged in what was then considered little more than an exhilarating pastime for lusty youth, is not doubted, in spite of Knight's ingenious efforts to remove this trifling blemish from Sweet Will's fair fame.

How far the reports as to the menial occupations through which the poet won his way to profitable employment in the purlieus of Blackfriars may be true, it is impossible now to determine, but all tend to prove the conviction entertained by those to whom we owe the earlist records of his life, of the elasticity of his spirit, and its wonderful adaptability to life's ever varying necessities. Certain it is that he soon rose superior to mean employment, and so active was he in connection with the Blackfriars Theatre, that from actor and corrector he became dramatist and joint proprietor. If we are justified in relying upon a document published by Collier in 1835 from the archives of the Earl of Ellesmere, in a petition dated Novembre 1589, among 16 sharers in the Blackfriars Theatre who solicit high protection for their stage, on the plea that they had never 'brought matters of state or religion unfit to be handled before lewd spectators', Shakespeare's name appears 12th upon the list'). Greene's 'Groatsworth of Wit', wherein, amid other evidence of envy, our dramatist is called derisively 'the ouly Shake-scene in the country', proves him to have been eminently active before 1592. Marlowe, as well as Shakespeare, having been offended by this tract, Chettle, Greene's literary executor, writes as it were apologetically with regard to Shakespeare, in his preface to 'Kind Harte's Dreame', that he had seen his demeanour no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes; besides divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing which approves his art'. How invaluable is this testimony as to Shakespeare's character and disposition, doubly so when it is borne in mind that the only attack that elicited it was upon his literary reputation. What fine tact, whilst giving utterance to the freest sentiments in politics as well

1) With regard to this valuable document, as well as a host of others, and also as respects the so-called Collier Emendations, we are loath to believe, that one who has rendered and is still rendering such signal services to the students of early English literature, and more especially of Shakespeare, can have made himself amenable to the charge of literary forgery, and we are sustained herein by no less an authority than that of Professor Mommsen, the well known Shakespeare critic.

as in social life, must have characterized him, to enable him who curried no courtly favour, to win the friendship of two such noblemen as the earls of Pembroke and Southampton. The intensity of his attachment to the latter is beyond all question, even though we may doubt the accuracy of the amount of the generous lord's noble gift, reported to have been no less a sum than £1000, to aid the poet in a purchase. The existence of bosom friendship between a proud peer and a humble commoner, pursuing a calling that contemporaneous evidence declares degrading, is proof incontestable of Shakespeare's admirable social qualities and inborn dignity as a gentleman. His unbroken harmony with the best intellects of his day, Ben Jonson first and foremost, is too well-known to need sustaining evidence; that the learned Ben's admiration should be more discriminating than that of inferior minds, is but the greater proof of appreciation. Equally indisputable, and perhaps even more surprising, is the friendship he consistently maintained with Burbage, the Roscius of his day, with that genus irritabile, the smaller fry of contemporary actors, and with his co-proprietors of the Globe and the Blackfriars Theatres. The scanty detractors that he had do but tend to show the high estimation in which he must have been generally held.

It is to Jonson that we owe our knowledge of the favour Shakespeare found in the sight of royalty, when we read:

'Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were To see thee in our waters yet appear,

And make those flights upon the banks of Thames That so did take Eliza and our James.' Otway in his Prologue to Caius Marius, 1692, thus alludes to the same fact: 'Our Shakespeare wrote to oin an age as blest, A constant favour he ne'er feared to lose. The happiest poet of his time and best; Therefore he wrote with fancy unconfined, A gracious prince's favour cheered his Muse, And thoughts that were immortal as his mind.' To resume the incidents of his life. The Blackfriars Theatre having fallen into disrepair, the Globe was built by its proprietors as a summer theatre about 1594, whilst the Blackfriars was allowed, thanks probably to Shakespeare's influence in high quarters, to be renovated, in spite of the serious opposition of the Corporation. But in proportion as the poet's prosperity increased, his yearning towards his native town led him to invest his earnings there in landed property. He not only became the owner of the best house in New Place, but continued from time to time, to purchase lands and tenements there, until somewhere about 1604 he settled once more, and that permanently, in his native town.

There he is reported to have lived upon a liberal scale, respected by his fellowtownsmen, enjoying, in the words of Rowe, 'ease, retirement and the conversation of his friends'. But besides contributing two plays annually to the London stage, as stated by Ward, the Vicar of Stratford, in his diary 1662, he would seem to have repeatedly visited his old haunts in the metropolis, and even became possessed of real property there. That he did not despise any legitimate means of increasing his store, is manifest from a number of legal documents, exhibiting him in connection with business transactions of the most manifold character, now buying and selling land and houses, now farming tithes, and now lending money out at interest. For evidence we would refer the curious to the ample biographies of Halliwell, Knight, Collier, Hunter and a host of others.

How ardent must have been the poet's attachment to his birth-place, to quit the greater attractions of the great city and its richer mart, to retire to so quiet a nook! This is the more to be admired, considering the severe enactments passed by the municipal authorities of Stratford against dramatic representations. Here tradition states him to have yielded to the earth all of himself that could die on the 23rd of April 1616.

Shakespeare's character is thus dispassionately summed up by Halliwell: 'prudent and active in the business of life, judicious and honest, possessing great conversational talent, universally esteemed as gentle and amiable; yet more desirous of accumulating property than increasing his reputation' (which he assuredly felt that his works would amply provide for) 'and occasionally indulging in courses irregular and wild'. His supposed wordly-mindedness is thus hinted at with characteristic want of charity by Pope:

Shakespeare whom you and ev'ry playhouse bili For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight, Style the divine, the matchless, what you will, And grew immortal in his own despite.

Surely never was there a more brilliant illustration in mortal man of the commingAling of the real with the ideal. The genesis of his immortal genius must ever remain a mystery, or, as it has been, a field for unlimited conjecture, so long as all we possess under his own hand and seal are the tremulous signatures to his will, and the more decided ones attached to a legal document or two. What a treasure-trove would be a single manuscript! The originals of his 37 dramas are supposed to have been cousumed in the fire at the Globe in 1613, during the performance of Henry VIII; but surely his correspondence and other manuscripts must have been preserved elsewhere. The destruction of these, if an accomplished fact, would almost seem to have been a wilful act, attributable perhaps to the straitlacedness of his somewhat puritanical descendants. Even the Sonnets, 154 in number, usually regarded as the momentary efflux of the poet's heart, are ransacked in vain for a safe clue to the intricacies of Shakespeare's idiosyncrasie. The most conflicting theories have been broached upon the slender basis thus afforded, so that in spite of the eloqueut lucubrations of Gerald Massey, recently launched into some 500 pages of print, the sonnets remain, as heretofore, a Sphinx or an Asian mystery to unbiased minds. This total absence of all evidence as to the development of the poet's literary life, has recently emboldened one Nathaniel Holmes to follow in the wake of Miss Delia Bacon and a Mr Smith, in an endeavour, reported by the 'Athenaeum' to be sustained, in the latest instance, by unwonted subtlety of reasoning, to prove that 'Shakespeare was not himself, but some other man, probably Lord Bacon, possibly Sir Walter Raleigh'.

That a host of portraits, having little that is characteristic in common, and none of unquestioned genuineness, should proffer unsubstantiated claims to our belief, is less to be wondered at; yet we are loath to unfamiliarize ourselves with those handsome and expressive features conventionally ascribed to our beloved Shakespeare'.

What may have been the prevailing tone of his mind it would seem hard to tell, for if his works be taken as a criterion, he may be pronounced as 'all things by turns and nothing long'. Masson declares that 'Melancholy marked him for her own', if so it was the goddess of 'il Pensoroso', 'sage and holy, of staid wisdom's hue, with even step and musing gait and looks commercing with the skies, in her train retired Leisure, and he that soars on golden wing, guiding the fiery-wheeled throne, the Cherub Contemplation, while gorgeous Tragedy, in sceptred pall, comes sweeping by, producing sweetest music, above, about, or underneath, sent by some spirits to mortals good, or the unseen genius of the wood'.

How characteristic these utterances by a kindred spirit, of Shakespeare's so-called wood-notes wild. The 'concord of sweet sounds' that he has yielded awakes an undying echo in the breast of every one that utters his land's language, and needed no impulse from without to call it forth.

Of this an enumeration of the editions Shakespeare's works have undergone before his light burst in upon our German kindred will yield unquestionable testimony.

1623 appeared the first edition of Shakespeare's collected works in folio, edited by Heminge & Condell; 1632 appeared the second folio; 1664 appeared the third; 1685 the fourth. Then followed in 1709 and 1714 Rowe; 1725 and 1728 Pope; 1733—40 Theobald; 1744 Hammer; 1747 Warburton; 1765 Johnson; 1768 Capell; 1773 and 1779 Johnson & Steevens; 1785 Reed; 1790 Malone; 1786-94 Rann. This simple list might alone suffice to show the extent to which the study of Shakespeare was cultivated by the people at large, for the editors of the 18th century were at the same time commentators, and expended an amount of elucidation and research upon the text such as, with the exception of the Book of Books, no writer ancient or modern ever had bestowed upon him. But it were an easy task, did our space admit of it, to prove the estimation in which our poet was held by the deepest thinkers of his own country down to the present day. A few may suffice. Milton's brilliant eulogy, for to him alone such lines are deemed attributable, appended to the second folio of Shakespeare's works, too

long for quotation, speaks volumes as to his appreciation of the dramatist's o'ermastering spirit. Of later royal personages who affected Shakespeare, Charles I has bequeathed irrefragable proofs of admiration in his own hand, the king's copy being still preserved at Windsor Castle Library, bearing marks of careful study. After him we cannot expect to find the world's poet a special favourite in high quarters, pending the supremacy of the spirit that dictated Prynne's furious attack upon the stage in his ponderous Histriomastrix. As little might we expect to find Shakespeare appreciated at and after the Restoration, when there prevailed the muddy impurity of such dramatists as Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar and their compeers, the spirit of whose productions Macaulay pronounces 'earthly, sensual, devilish'.

Licentiousness, as usual, followed upon asceticism; what wonder then if Shakespeare's chaster Muse should cease to please in public. Yet in the very midst of the general corruption, the noblest spirit of the age, we mean of course John Dryden, could thus write of him: 'He was the man, who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily. When he describes anything you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him of having wanted learning, give him the greater commendation. He was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike; were he so I should do him an injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him; no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of the poets

Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.

The consideration of this made Mr. Hales of Eton say, that there was no subject of which any poet ever writ, but he would produce it much better done in Shakespeare; and however others are now generally preferred before him, yet the age wherein he lived, which had contemporaries with him Fletcher and Jonson, never equalled them to him in their esteem. And in the last King's court, when Ben's reputation was as its highest, Sir John Suckling, and with him the greater part of the courtiers, set our Shakespeare far above him'.

At a period when even the great critic himself was bitten with the rage for so-called classical revivals, and the triple unities, which Shakespeare systematically neglected, the above is assuredly enough to prove that, banished from the stage, he found a refuge, ever widening its circuit, in the hearts and homes of his polished countrymen.

in

Here firmly fixed is his dwelling-place for ever. In the terse lines of Pope, the polished prose of Addison, and the ponderous periods of Johnson, not to speak of a host of minor songsters, his praises are sung in every varying cadence; and the Garricks, Keans and Kembles complete the diapason, adding poetical embodiment to imaginative conception, with or without the aid of critic crew. How then can Heine declare, and Gervinus confirm, the obligation of the English for a knowledge of the thousand-souled' to German criticism? If it be affirmed that Germany has yielded the greatest amount of criticism, the fact is undeniable: if the term be taken to imply that elaborate metaphysical refining that is the badge of their tribe, we admit it, and quote the words of Coleridge corroboration. "The Germans, unable to distinguish themselves in action, have been driven to speculation: all their feelings have been forced back into the thinking and reasoning mind. To do, with them is impossible, but in determining what ought to be done, they perhaps exceed every people of the globe. Incapable of acting outwardly they have acted internally: they first rationally recalled the ancient philosophy, and set their spirits to work with an energy of which England produces no parallel, since those truly heroic times, heroic in body as in soul, the days of Elizabeth'. To us it appears at times as though the German critic, somewhat after the fashion of the farfamed hero of hyperbole, fastened his metaphysical Pegasus, spurning terra firma, to an imaginary steeple. Their ability to soar into the realms of the unreal is unquestionable.