or nearly so; the spectators have no right to speak, they would be answered: It is history. And the figure of King John turns on its pivot, patriot king and national hero, then all of a sudden cowardly assassin and traitor to the interests of his country. The change, it is true, would be far better graduated if it were a question of Othello, but then Othello does not belong to history. Has not Boileau said, besides, to justify his rule:

L'esprit n'est point ému de ce qu'il ne croit pas?

"The mind is not stirred by what it does not believe." Well, thought the London playwrights, our public asks for no more than we offer. It believes, and is stirred. To please is the only rule. The great dramatist follows it to its extreme consequences, the best and the worst. His lyrical outbursts, his deep remarks inspired by a divine genius, his thoughts, of which several will occur later to Pascal and be expressed in almost the same terms, that knowledge of human anguish and human tenderness which he can condense into one line so perfect and so pregnant that a whole book could not teach more, delight the multitude, traverse the thick layers of its vulgarity, penetrate to the heart and illumine it, as a flash of lightning cleaves the clouds. To our greater advantage, the poet happily multiplies those splendid passages; incomparable ones are to be found even in the least of his plays. But, averse to restraint, unable to hold himself in check, "lacking arte," as Jonson said, he puts them sometimes in the best possible place, sometimes in the worst; he can neither wait nor correct; his fireworks rise to the heavens or hang fire in a a ditch. He furnishes the queen in Cymbeline" with an admirable eulogy of her country

"Love's reason is without reason" ("Cymbeline," v. 2)—“ Le cœur a des raisons que la raison ne connait point" ("Pensées ").

and of British courage, and the queen is the dark character and one of the traitors of the play. He has an exquisite description of the little princes in the Tower,

Girdling one another

Within their alabaster innocent arms:

Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,

Which, in their summer beauty, kiss'd each other.

And this description is attributed to the low brutes who have murdered them. At the sight of bleeding combatants, the Severn,

Affrighted with their bloody looks,
Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,
And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank.

These lines are attributed to fiery Hotspur, but it is in reality the poet of "Venus and Adonis" who speaks through his mouth.3

Bad taste, like improbabilities, was a way of pleasing. What is commonly called bad taste, the English multitude of that day, as we know, called wit. They could appreciate the real wit that abounds in Shakespearian plays, but sham wit too had a keen charm for them, and they felt very grateful to authors who gave them that enjoyment. Far-fetched similes were deemed happy' finds. Shakespeare offered them plenteously; it was for him a way of resting and enlivening the audience, of relaxing its nerves; it would more readily return to the sombre and the tragic after this interlude. Not to speak of stray examples scattered here and there, he thus introduced whole scenes filled with quibbles, verbal jugglings, and plays on words, which sent the public into ecstasies: "Look, he's winding up the watch 2 "Richard III.," iv. 3. 3" Henry IV.,” i. 3.

Act iii. sc. I.

of his wit, by and by it will strike"; thereupon the shipwrecked princes and lords of "The Tempest" exchange facetious remarks, "merry fooling," endlessly, to fill the time, awaiting the events as the Celts of Britain had done time out of mind: a passage written by Giraldus Cambrensis four hundred years before reads like a prophetic description of this very scene.2

The liking for "disputoisons," dear to the Middle Ages, had not died out; it reappears here and there in Shakespeare's dramas, as lively as ever, to such an extent even that the poet supplies unawares, on one occasion, a parallel to the famous fabliau of the "Jongleur d'Ely."3 The characters of the plays are themselves rapturous over these conceits; they may pretend, at times, to think there are too many of them: "Well, your old vice still, mistake the word; "4 but they persist, for, in reality, the public never found it had too much. Witticisms, quirks and quibbles, or merely conundrums and puns, were they even bad ones, always delighted it, at whatever moment: one cannot, it thought, have too much wit. And Shakespeare, by nature little enough

Act ii. sc. I.

"Facetiam in sermone plurimam observant; dum vel sales vel lædoria, nunc levi nunc mordaci, sub æquivocationis vel amphibolæ nebula, relatione diversa, transpositione verborum et trajectione, subtiles et dicaces emittunt.” -Above, vol. I. p. to.

3 Encounter between a serious personage and a pseudo-simpleton, who gets the better of the former: "Friend! you! pray you a word: Do not you follow the young lord Paris?"-Servant: "Ay, sir, when he goes before me," etc. ("Troilus," iii. 1). Cf. "Jongleur d'Ely":

Ou qy estes vus, sire Joglour? . . .

Sire, je su ou mon seignour,

etc. (To whom do you belong, Mr. Juggler?-Sire, I belong to my master). On this fabliau of the thirteenth century and on disputoisons or debates, preparing the way for comedy, see above, vol. I. p. 442. A real disputoison (the defence of spring and of winter by a cuckoo and an owl) ends "Love's Labour's Lost."

4 "Two Gentlemen," iii. I.

disposed to select his occasions, lent his wit to his various characters, even on their death-bed: King John, John of Gaunt, Henry IV. die, a pun on their lips,1 and the poet's only concession to sober taste is to make one of the bystanders remark:

Can sick men play so nicely with their names?

As to suppressing these embellishments, there could be no question of that. Romeo's death inspires the Prince of Verona with punning remarks,2 and Antony's death has the same effect on Cleopatra. In that again, truth to say, Shakespeare, before all a man of his times, could invoke precedents drawn from real life: condemned by an iniquitous judgment, the puritan John Stubbe, on the scaffold, made a pun at the moment when the executioner was about to cut off his hand.3

In the end, however, the abuse engendered some lassitude, even in the public; during the latter part of his career, the poet was far more chary of this verbal jugglery than during the first. But to the last he retained some of his partiality for those far-fetched similes and elaborate conceits, beloved for a while by

■ Gaunt. O, how that name befits my composition!

Old Gaunt, indeed; and gaunt in being old, etc.

Eleven lines are devoted to playing on this word, after which the dying man takes up others:

Deposing thee before thou wert possess'd,
Which art possess'd now to depose thyself.

("Richard II.," ii. 1.)

Coleridge defends this scene and considers that

there is nothing unnatural in these puns at such a moment.-"Lectures," ed. Ashe, 1902, p. 150.

Addressed to old Montague:

Thou art early up,

To see thy son and heir more early down.

"Praye for me, nowe my calamitie is at hande," November 3, 1579, in Sir John Harington, "Nugæ Antiquæ," 1804, i. p. 154.

A

the French "Précieux" and execrated by Boileau. dagger which, its work done, "en rougit, le traître," seemed to the legislator of the French Parnassus the acme of bad taste. What would he have said, had he read Shakespeare, whose daggers, not content with blushing, are "unmannerly breech'd with gore "? Cæsar turns pale,

His coward lips did from their colour fly."

At his death, his blood seemed:

As rushing out of doors, to be resolv'd

If Brutus so unkindly knock'd or no.3

Cordelia seemed to be

A queen

Over her passion; who, most rebel-like,
Sought to be king o'er her."

To make them speak in flowery language, the more meritorious in the eyes of the public if the more unexpected, was one of the signs of Shakespeare's fondness for certain of his characters. In this he scarcely changed throughout his career. The red-hot iron is about to put out Arthur's eyes, but, happily, the fire "is dead with grief"

The breath of Heaven hath blown his spirit out,
And strew'd repentant ashes on his head.

If the executioner revives the flame, the instrument of torture will "glow with shame."s These pretty ways of speaking, and many others of the same sort, are allotted to the victim: it was a means of making him interest"Julius Cæsar," i. 2.

3 III. 2.

"Macbeth," ii. 3.

4 "King Lear,' iv. 3.

5 "King John,” iv. I.