Thomas Tyler ...........................................................................................................................................2

Frank Harris.............................................................................................................................................3

Harris "durch Mitleid wissend"...............................................................................................................4

"Sidney's Sister: Pembroke's Mother"....................................................................................................4

Shakespear's Social Standing ...................................................................................................................5

This Side Idolatry .....................................................................................................................................6

Shakespear's Pessimism ...........................................................................................................................6

Gaiety of Genius......................................................................................................................................7

Jupiter and Semele...................................................................................................................................8

The Idol of the Bardolaters....................................................................................................................10

Shakespear's alleged Sycophancy and Perversion.................................................................................11

Shakespear and Democracy...................................................................................................................12

Shakespear and the British Public ..........................................................................................................13

THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS.............................................................................................15

I had better explain why, in this little piece d'occasion , written for a performance in aid of the funds of the

project for establishing a National Theatre as a memorial to Shakespear, I have identified the Dark Lady with

Mistress Mary Fitton. First, let me say that I do not contend that the Dark Lady was Mary Fitton, because

when the case in Mary's favor (or against her, if you please to consider that the Dark Lady was no better than

she ought to have been) was complete, a portrait of Mary came to light and turned out to be that of a fair lady,

not of a dark one. That settles the question, if the portrait is authentic, which I see no reason to doubt, and the

lady's hair undyed, which is perhaps less certain. Shakespear rubbed in the lady's complexion in his sonnets

mercilessly; for in his day black hair was as unpopular as red hair was in the early days of Queen Victoria.

Any tinge lighter than raven black must be held fatal to the strongest claim to be the Dark Lady. And so,

unless it can be shewn that Shakespear's sonnets exasperated Mary Fitton into dyeing her hair and getting

painted in false colors, I must give up all pretence that my play is historical. The later suggestion of Mr

Acheson that the Dark Lady, far from being a maid of honor, kept a tavern in Oxford and was the mother of

Davenant the poet, is the one I should have adopted had I wished to be up to date. Why, then, did I introduce

Well, I had two reasons. The play was not to have been written by me at all, but by Mrs Alfred Lyttelton; and

it was she who suggested a scene of jealousy between Queen Elizabeth and the Dark Lady at the expense of

the unfortunate Bard. Now this, if the Dark Lady was a maid of honor, was quite easy. If she were a tavern

landlady, it would have strained all probability. So I stuck to Mary Fitton. But I had another and more

personal reason. I was, in a manner, present at the birth of the Fitton theory. Its parent and I had become

acquainted; and he used to consult me on obscure passages in the sonnets, on which, as far as I can

remember, I never succeeded in throwing the faintest light, at a time when nobody else thought my opinion,

on that or any other subject, of the slightest importance. I thought it would be friendly to immortalize him, as

the silly literary saying is, much as Shakespear immortalized Mr W. H., as he said he would, simply by

Throughout the eighties at least, and probably for some years before, the British Museum reading room was

used daily by a gentleman of such astonishing and crushing ugliness that no one who had once seen him

could ever thereafter forget him. He was of fair complexion, rather golden red than sandy; aged between

fortyfive and sixty; and dressed in frock coat and tall hat of presentable but never new appearance. His

figure was rectangular, waistless, neckless, ankleless, of middle height, looking shortish because, though he

was not particularly stout, there was nothing slender about him. His ugliness was not unamiable; it was

accidental, external, excrescential. Attached to his face from the left ear to the point of his chin was a

monstrous goitre, which hung down to his collar bone, and was very inadequately balanced by a smaller one

on his right eyelid. Nature's malice was so overdone in his case that it somehow failed to produce the effect

of repulsion it seemed to have aimed at. When you first met Thomas Tyler you could think of nothing else

but whether surgery could really do nothing for him. But after a very brief acquaintance you never thought of

his disfigurements at all, and talked to him as you might to Romeo or Lovelace; only, so many people,

especially women, would not risk the preliminary ordeal, that he remained a man apart and a bachelor all his

days. I am not to be frightened or prejudiced by a tumor; and I struck up a cordial acquaintance with him, in

the course of which he kept me pretty closely on the track of his work at the Museum, in which I was then,

He was by profession a man of letters of an uncommercial kind. He was a specialist in pessimism; had made

a translation of Ecclesiastes of which eight copies a year were sold; and followed up the pessimism of

Shakespear and Swift with keen interest. He delighted in a hideous conception which he called the theory of

the cycles, according to which the history of mankind and the universe keeps eternally repeating itself

without the slightest variation throughout all eternity; so that he had lived and died and had his goitre before

and would live and die and have it again and again and again. He liked to believe that nothing that happened

to him was completely novel: he was persuaded that he often had some recollection of its previous occurrence

in the last cycle. He hunted out allusions to this favorite theory in his three favorite pessimists. He tried his

hand occasionally at deciphering ancient inscriptions, reading them as people seem to read the stars, by

discovering bears and bulls and swords and goats where, as it seems to me, no sane human being can see

anything but stars higgledypiggledy. Next to the translation of Ecclesiastes, his magnum opus was his work

on Shakespear's Sonnets, in which he accepted a previous identification of Mr W. H., the "onlie begetter" of

the sonnets, with the Earl of Pembroke (William Herbert), and promulgated his own identification of Mistress

Mary Fitton with the Dark Lady. Whether he was right or wrong about the Dark Lady did not matter urgently

to me: she might have been Maria Tompkins for all I cared. But Tyler would have it that she was Mary

Fitton; and he tracked Mary down from the first of her marriages in her teens to her tomb in Cheshire,

whither he made a pilgrimage and whence returned in triumph with a picture of her statue, and the news that

In due course he published his edition of the Sonnets, with the evidence he had collected. He lent me a copy

of the book, which I never returned. But I reviewed it in the Pall Mall Gazette on the 7th of January 1886, and

thereby let loose the Fitton theory in a wider circle of readers than the book could reach. Then Tyler died,

sinking unnoted like a stone in the sea. I observed that Mr Acheson, Mrs Davenant's champion, calls him

Reverend. It may very well be that he got his knowledge of Hebrew in reading for the Church; and there was

always something of the clergyman or the schoolmaster in his dress and air. Possibly he may actually have

been ordained. But he never told me that or anything else about his affairs; and his black pessimism would

have shot him violently out of any church at present established in the West. We never talked about affairs:

we talked about Shakespear, and the Dark Lady, and Swift, and Koheleth, and the cycles, and the mysterious

moments when a feeling came over us that this had happened to us before, and about the forgeries of the

Pentateuch which were offered for sale to the British Museum, and about literature and things of the spirit

generally. He always came to my desk at the Museum and spoke to me about something or other, no doubt

finding that people who were keen on this sort of conversation were rather scarce. He remains a vivid spot of

memory in the void of my forgetfulness, a quite considerable and dignified soul in a grotesquely disfigured

To the review in the Pall Mall Gazette I attribute, rightly or wrongly, the introduction of Mary Fitton to Mr

Frank Harris. My reason for this is that Mr Harris wrote a play about Shakespear and Mary Fitton; and when

I, as a pious duty to Tyler's ghost, reminded the world that it was to Tyler we owed the Fitton theory, Frank

Harris, who clearly had not a notion of what had first put Mary into his head, believed, I think, that I had

invented Tyler expressly for his discomfiture; for the stress I laid on Tyler's claims must have seemed

unaccountable and perhaps malicious on the assumption that he was to me a mere name among the thousands

of names in the British Museum catalogue. Therefore I make it clear that I had and have personal reasons for

remembering Tyler, and for regarding myself as in some sort charged with the duty of reminding the world of

his work. I am sorry for his sake that Mary's portrait is fair, and that Mr W. H. has veered round again from

Pembroke to Southampton; but even so his work was not wasted: it is by exhausting all the hypotheses that

we reach the verifiable one; and after all, the wrong road always leads somewhere.

Frank Harris's play was written long before mine. I read it in manuscript before the Shakespear Memorial

National Theatre was mooted; and if there is anything except the Fitton theory (which is Tyler's property) in

my play which is also in Mr Harris's it was I who annexed it from him and not he from me. It does not matter

anyhow, because this play of mine is a brief trifle, and full of manifest impossibilities at that; whilst Mr

Harris's play is serious both in size, intention, and quality. But there could not in the nature of things be much

resemblance, because Frank conceives Shakespear to have been a brokenhearted, melancholy, enormously

sentimental person, whereas I am convinced that he was very like myself: in fact, if I had been born in 1556

instead of in 1856, I should have taken to blank verse and given Shakespear a harder run for his money than

all the other Elizabethans put together. Yet the success of Frank Harris's book on Shakespear gave me great

To those who know the literary world of London there was a sharp stroke of ironic comedy in the irresistible

verdict in its favor. In critical literature there is one prize that is always open to competition, one blue ribbon

that always carries the highest critical rank with it. To win, you must write the best book of your generation

on Shakespear. It is felt on all sides that to do this a certain fastidious refinement, a delicacy of taste, a

correctness of manner and tone, and high academic distinction in addition to the indispensable scholarship

and literary reputation, are needed; and men who pretend to these qualifications are constantly looked to with

a gentle expectation that presently they will achieve the great feat. Now if there is a man on earth who is the

utter contrary of everything that this description implies; whose very existence is an insult to the ideal it

realizes; whose eye disparages, whose resonant voice denounces, whose cold shoulder jostles every decency,

every delicacy, every amenity, every dignity, every sweet usage of that quiet life of mutual admiration in

which perfect Shakespearian appreciation is expected to arise, that man is Frank Harris. Here is one who is

extraordinarily qualified, by a range of sympathy and understanding that extends from the ribaldry of a

buccaneer to the shyest tendernesses of the most sensitive poetry, to be all things to all men, yet whose proud

humor it is to be to every man, provided the man is eminent and pretentious, the champion of his enemies. To

the Archbishop he is an atheist, to the atheist a Catholic mystic, to the Bismarckian Imperialist an Anacharsis

Klootz, to Anacharsis Klootz a Washington, to Mrs Proudie a Don Juan, to Aspasia a John Knox: in short, to

everyone his complement rather than his counterpart, his antagonist rather than his fellowcreature. Always

provided, however, that the persons thus confronted are respectable persons. Sophie Perovskaia, who

perished on the scaffold for blowing Alexander II to fragments, may perhaps have echoed Hamlet's

but Frank Harris, in his Sonia, has rescued her from that injustice, and enshrined her among the saints. He has

lifted the Chicago anarchists out of their infamy, and shewn that, compared with the Capitalism that killed

them, they were heroes and martyrs. He has done this with the most unusual power of conviction. The story,

as he tells it, inevitably and irresistibly displaces all the vulgar, mean, purblind, spiteful versions. There is a

precise realism and an unsmiling, measured, determined sincerity which gives a strange dignity to the work

of one whose fixed practice and ungovernable impulse it is to kick conventional dignity whenever he sees it.

Frank Harris is everything except a humorist, not, apparently, from stupidity, but because scorn overcomes

humor in him. Nobody ever dreamt of reproaching Milton's Lucifer for not seeing the comic side of his fall;

and nobody who has read Mr Harris's stories desires to have them lightened by chapters from the hand of

Artemus Ward. Yet he knows the taste and the value of humor. He was one of the few men of letters who

really appreciated Oscar Wilde, though he did not rally fiercely to Wilde's side until the world deserted Oscar

in his ruin. I myself was present at a curious meeting between the two, when Harris, on the eve of the

Queensberry trial, prophesied to Wilde with miraculous precision exactly what immediately afterwards

happened to him, and warned him to leave the country. It was the first time within my knowledge that such a

forecast proved true. Wilde, though under no illusion as to the folly of the quite unselfish suitatlaw he had

been persuaded to begin, nevertheless so miscalculated the force of the social vengeance he was unloosing on

himself that he fancied it could be stayed by putting up the editor of The Saturday Review (as Mr Harris then

was) to declare that he considered Dorian Grey a highly moral book, which it certainly is. When Harris

foretold him the truth, Wilde denounced him as a fainthearted friend who was failing him in his hour of need,

and left the room in anger. Harris's idiosyncratic power of pity saved him from feeling or shewing the

smallest resentment; and events presently proved to Wilde how insanely he had been advised in taking the

The same capacity for pity governs Harris's study of Shakespear, whom, as I have said, he pities too much;

but that he is not insensible to humor is shewn not only by his appreciation of Wilde, but by the fact that the

group of contributors who made his editorship of The Saturday Review so remarkable, and of whom I speak

none the less highly because I happened to be one of them myself, were all, in their various ways, humorists.

And now to return to Shakespear. Though Mr Harris followed Tyler in identifying Mary Fitton as the Dark

Lady, and the Earl of Pembroke as the addressee of the other sonnets and the man who made love

successfully to Shakespear's mistress, he very characteristically refuses to follow Tyler on one point, though

for the life of me I cannot remember whether it was one of the surmises which Tyler published, or only one

which he submitted to me to see what I would say about it, just as he used to submit difficult lines from the

This surmise was that "Sidney's sister: Pembroke's mother" set Shakespear on to persuade Pembroke to

marry, and that this was the explanation of those earlier sonnets which so persistently and unnaturally urged

matrimony on Mr W. H. I take this to be one of the brightest of Tyler's ideas, because the persuasions in the

sonnets are unaccountable and out of character unless they were offered to please somebody whom

Shakespear desired to please, and who took a motherly interest in Pembroke. There is a further temptation in

the theory for me. The most charming of all Shakespear's old women, indeed the most charming of all his

women, young or old, is the Countess of Rousillon in All's Well That Ends Well. It has a certain individuality

among them which suggests a portrait. Mr Harris will have it that all Shakespear's nice old women are drawn

from his beloved mother; but I see no evidence whatever that Shakespear's mother was a particularly nice

woman or that he was particularly fond of her. That she was a simple incarnation of extravagant maternal

pride like the mother of Coriolanus in Plutarch, as Mr Harris asserts, I cannot believe: she is quite as likely to

have borne her son a grudge for becoming "one of these harlotry players" and disgracing the Ardens.

Anyhow, as a conjectural model for the Countess of Rousillon, I prefer that one of whom Jonson wrote

But Frank will not have her at any price, because his ideal Shakespear is rather like a sailor in a melodrama;

and a sailor in a melodrama must adore his mother. I do not at all belittle such sailors. They are the emblems

of human generosity; but Shakespear was not an emblem: he was a man and the author of Hamlet, who had

On the vexed question of Shakespear's social standing Mr Harris says that Shakespear "had not had the

advantage of a middleclass training." I suggest that Shakespear missed this questionable advantage, not

because he was socially too low to have attained to it, but because he conceived himself as belonging to the

upper class from which our public school boys are now drawn. Let Mr Harris survey for a moment the field

of contemporary journalism. He will see there some men who have the very characteristics from which he

infers that Shakespear was at a social disadvantage through his lack of middleclass training. They are

rowdy, illmannered, abusive, mischievous, fond of quoting obscene schoolboy anecdotes, adepts in that sort

of blackmail which consists in mercilessly libelling and insulting every writer whose opinions are sufficiently

heterodox to make it almost impossible for him to risk perhaps five years of a slender income by an appeal to

a prejudiced orthodox jury; and they see nothing in all this cruel blackguardism but an uproariously jolly rag,

although they are by no means without genuine literary ability, a love of letters, and even some artistic

conscience. But he will find not one of the models of his type (I say nothing of mere imitators of it) below the

rank that looks at the middle class, not humbly and enviously from below, but insolently from above. Mr

Harris himself notes Shakespear's contempt for the tradesman and mechanic, and his incorrigible addiction to

smutty jokes. He does us the public service of sweeping away the familiar plea of the Bardolatrous

ignoramus, that Shakespear's coarseness was part of the manners of his time, putting his pen with precision

on the one name, Spenser, that is necessary to expose such a libel on Elizabethan decency. There was nothing

whatever to prevent Shakespear from being as decent as More was before him, or Bunyan after him, and as

selfrespecting as Raleigh or Sidney, except the tradition of his class, in which education or statesmanship

may no doubt be acquired by those who have a turn for them, but in which insolence, derision, profligacy,

obscene jesting, debt contracting, and rowdy mischievousness, give continual scandal to the pious, serious,

industrious, solvent bourgeois. No other class is infatuated enough to believe that gentlemen are born and not

made by a very elaborate process of culture. Even kings are taught and coached and drilled from their earliest

boyhood to play their part. But the man of family (I am convinced that Shakespear took that view of himself)

will plunge into society without a lesson in table manners, into politics without a lesson in history, into the

It has been said, with the object of proving Shakespear a laborer, that he could hardly write his name. Why?

Because he "had not the advantage of a middleclass training." Shakespear himself tells us, through Hamlet,

that gentlemen purposely wrote badly lest they should be mistaken for scriveners; but most of them, then as

now, wrote badly because they could not write any better. In short, the whole range of Shakespear's foibles:

the snobbishness, the naughtiness, the contempt for tradesmen and mechanics, the assumption that witty

conversation can only mean smutty conversation, the flunkeyism towards social superiors and insolence

towards social inferiors, the easy ways with servants which is seen not only between The Two Gentlemen of

Verona and their valets, but in the affection and respect inspired by a great servant like Adam: all these are

the characteristics of Eton and Harrow, not of the public elementary or private adventure school. They prove,

as everything we know about Shakespear suggests, that he thought of the Shakespears and Ardens as families

of consequence, and regarded himself as a gentleman under a cloud through his father's ill luck in business,

and never for a moment as a man of the people. This is at once the explanation of and excuse for his

snobbery. He was not a parvenu trying to cover his humble origin with a purchased coat of arms: he was a

gentleman resuming what he conceived to be his natural position as soon as he gained the means to keep it

There is another matter which I think Mr Harris should ponder. He says that Shakespear was but "little

esteemed by his own generation." He even describes Jonson's description of his "little Latin and less Greek"

as a sneer, whereas it occurs in an unmistakably sincere eulogy of Shakespear, written after his death, and is

clearly meant to heighten the impression of Shakespear's prodigious natural endowments by pointing out that

they were not due to scholastic acquirements. Now there is a sense in which it is true enough that Shakespear

was too little esteemed by his own generation, or, for the matter of that, by any subsequent generation. The

bargees on the Regent's Canal do not chant Shakespear's verses as the gondoliers in Venice are said to chant

the verses of Tasso (a practice which was suspended for some reason during my stay in Venice: at least no

gondolier ever did it in my hearing). Shakespear is no more a popular author than Rodin is a popular sculptor

or Richard Strauss a popular composer. But Shakespear was certainly not such a fool as to expect the Toms,

Dicks, and Harrys of his time to be any more interested in dramatic poetry than Newton, later on, expected

them to be interested in fluxions. And when we come to the question whether Shakespear missed that

assurance which all great men have had from the more capable and susceptible members of their generation

that they were great men, Ben Jonson's evidence disposes of so improbable a notion at once and for ever. "I

loved the man," says Ben, "this side idolatry, as well as any." Now why in the name of common sense should

he have made that qualification unless there had been, not only idolatry, but idolatry fulsome enough to

irritate Jonson into an express disavowal of it? Jonson, the bricklayer, must have felt sore sometimes when

Shakespear spoke and wrote of bricklayers as his inferiors. He must have felt it a little hard that being a better

scholar, and perhaps a braver and tougher man physically than Shakespear, he was not so successful or so

well liked. But in spite of this he praised Shakespear to the utmost stretch of his powers of eulogy: in fact,

notwithstanding his disclaimer, he did not stop "this side idolatry." If, therefore, even Jonson felt himself

forced to clear himself of extravagance and absurdity in his appreciation of Shakespear, there must have been

many people about who idolized Shakespear as American ladies idolize Paderewski, and who carried

Bardolatry, even in the Bard's own time, to an extent that threatened to make his reasonable admirers

I submit to Mr Harris that by ruling out this idolatry, and its possible effect in making Shakespear think that

his public would stand anything from him, he has ruled out a far more plausible explanation of the faults of

such a play as Timon of Athens than his theory that Shakespear's passion for the Dark Lady "cankered and

took on proud flesh in him, and tortured him to nervous breakdown and madness." In Timon the intellectual

bankruptcy is obvious enough: Shakespear tried once too often to make a play out of the cheap pessimism

which is thrown into despair by a comparison of actual human nature with theoretical morality, actual law

and administration with abstract justice, and so forth. But Shakespear's perception of the fact that all men,

judged by the moral standard which they apply to others and by which they justify their punishment of others,

are fools and scoundrels, does not date from the Dark Lady complication: he seems to have been born with it.

If in The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night's Dream the persons of the drama are not quite so ready

for treachery and murder as Laertes and even Hamlet himself (not to mention the procession of ruffians who

pass through the latest plays) it is certainly not because they have any more regard for law or religion. There

is only one place in Shakespear's plays where the sense of shame is used as a human attribute; and that is

where Hamlet is ashamed, not of anything he himself has done, but of his mother's relations with his uncle.

This scene is an unnatural one: the son's reproaches to his mother, even the fact of his being able to discuss

the subject with her, is more repulsive than her relations with her deceased husband's brother.

Here, too, Shakespear betrays for once his religious sense by making Hamlet, in his agony of shame, declare

that his mother's conduct makes "sweet religion a rhapsody of words." But for that passage we might almost

suppose that the feeling of Sunday morning in the country which Orlando describes so perfectly in As You

Like It was the beginning and end of Shakespear's notion of religion. I say almost, because Isabella in

Measure for Measure has religious charm, in spite of the conventional theatrical assumption that female

religion means an inhumanly ferocious chastity. But for the most part Shakespear differentiates his heroes

from his villains much more by what they do than by what they are. Don John in Much Ado is a true villain: a

man with a malicious will; but he is too dull a duffer to be of any use in a leading part; and when we come to

the great villains like Macbeth, we find, as Mr Harris points out, that they are precisely identical with the

heroes: Macbeth is only Hamlet incongruously committing murders and engaging in handtohand combats.

And Hamlet, who does not dream of apologizing for the three murders he commits, is always apologizing

because he has not yet committed a fourth, and finds, to his great bewilderment, that he does not want to

commit it. "It cannot be," he says, "but I am pigeonlivered, and lack gall to make oppression bitter; else, ere

this, I should have fatted all the region kites with this slave's offal." Really one is tempted to suspect that

when Shylock asks "Hates any man the thing he would not kill?" he is expressing the natural and proper

sentiments of the human race as Shakespear understood them, and not the vindictiveness of a stage Jew.

In view of these facts, it is dangerous to cite Shakespear's pessimism as evidence of the despair of a heart

broken by the Dark Lady. There is an irrepressible gaiety of genius which enables it to bear the whole weight

of the world's misery without blenching. There is a laugh always ready to avenge its tears of discouragement.

In the lines which Mr Harris quotes only to declare that he can make nothing of them, and to condemn them

Let me again remind Mr Harris of Oscar Wilde. We all dreaded to read De Profundis: our instinct was to stop

our ears, or run away from the wail of a broken, though by no means contrite, heart. But we were throwing

away our pity. De Profundis was de profundis indeed: Wilde was too good a dramatist to throw away so

powerful an effect; but none the less it was de profundis in excelsis. There was more laughter between the

lines of that book than in a thousand farces by men of no genius. Wilde, like Richard and Shakespear, found

in himself no pity for himself. There is nothing that marks the born dramatist more unmistakably than this

discovery of comedy in his own misfortunes almost in proportion to the pathos with which the ordinary man

announces their tragedy. I cannot for the life of me see the broken heart in Shakespear's latest works. "Hark,

hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings" is not the lyric of a broken man; nor is Cloten's comment that if Imogen

does not appreciate it, "it is a vice in her ears which horse hairs, and cats' guts, and the voice of unpaved

eunuch to boot, can never amend," the sally of a saddened one. Is it not clear that to the last there was in

Shakespear an incorrigible divine levity, an inexhaustible joy that derided sorrow? Think of the poor Dark

Lady having to stand up to this unbearable power of extracting a grim fun from everything. Mr Harris writes

as if Shakespear did all the suffering and the Dark Lady all the cruelty. But why does he not put himself in

the Dark Lady's place for a moment as he has put himself so successfully in Shakespear's? Imagine her

Take this as a sample of the sort of compliment from which she was never for a moment safe with

Shakespear. Bear in mind that she was not a comedian; that the Elizabethan fashion of treating brunettes as

ugly woman must have made her rather sore on the subject of her complexion; that no human being, male or

female, can conceivably enjoy being chaffed on that point in the fourth couplet about the perfumes; that

Shakespear's revulsions, as the sonnet immediately preceding shews, were as violent as his ardors, and were

expressed with the realistic power and horror that makes Hamlet say that the heavens got sick when they saw

the queen's conduct; and then ask Mr Harris whether any woman could have stood it for long, or have thought

the "sugred" compliment worth the cruel wounds, the cleaving of the heart in twain, that seemed to

Shakespear as natural and amusing a reaction as the burlesquing of his heroics by Pistol, his sermons by

This does not mean that Shakespear was cruel: evidently he was not; but it was not cruelty that made Jupiter

reduce Semele to ashes: it was the fact that he could not help being a god nor she help being a mortal. The

one thing Shakespear's passion for the Dark Lady was not, was what Mr Harris in one passage calls it:

idolatrous. If it had been, she might have been able to stand it. The man who "dotes yet doubts, suspects, yet

strongly loves," is tolerable even by a spoilt and tyrannical mistress; but what woman could possibly endure a

man who dotes without doubting; who knows , and who is hugely amused at the absurdity of his infatuation

for a woman of whose mortal imperfections not one escapes him: a man always exchanging grins with

Yorick's skull, and inviting "my lady" to laugh at the sepulchral humor of the fact that though she paint an

inch thick (which the Dark Lady may have done), to Yorick's favor she must come at last. To the Dark Lady

he must sometimes have seemed cruel beyond description: an intellectual Caliban. True, a Caliban who could

which is very lovely; but the Dark Lady may have had that vice in her ears which Cloten dreaded: she may

not have seen the beauty of it, whereas there can be no doubt at all that of "My mistress' eyes are nothing like

And is it to be supposed that Shakespear was too stupid or too modest not to see at last that it was a case of

Jupiter and Semele? Shakespear was most certainly not modest in that sense. The timid cough of the minor

is only one out of a dozen passages in which he (possibly with a keen sense of the fun of scandalizing the

modest coughers) proclaimed his place and his power in "the wide world dreaming of things to come." The

Dark Lady most likely thought this side of him insufferably conceited; for there is no reason to suppose that

she liked his plays any better than Minna Wagner liked Richard's music dramas: as likely as not, she thought

The Spanish Tragedy worth six Hamlets. He was not stupid either: if his class limitations and a profession

that cut him off from actual participation in great affairs of State had not confined his opportunities of

intellectual and political training to private conversation and to the Mermaid Tavern, he would probably have

become one of the ablest men of his time instead of being merely its ablest playwright. One might surmise

that Shakespear found out that the Dark Lady's brains could no more keep pace with his than Anne

Hathaway's, if there were any evidence that their friendship ceased when he stopped writing sonnets to her.

As a matter of fact the consolidation of a passion into an enduring intimacy generally puts an end to sonnets.

That the Dark Lady broke Shakespear's heart, as Mr Harris will have it she did, is an extremely

unShakespearian hypothesis. "Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them; but not for

love," says Rosalind. Richard of Gloster, into whom Shakespear put all his own impish superiority to vulgar

Hamlet has not a tear for Ophelia: her death moves him to fierce disgust for the sentimentality of Laertes by

her grave; and when he discusses the scene with Horatio immediately after, he utterly forgets her, though he

is sorry he forgot himself, and jumps at the proposal of a fencing match to finish the day with. As against this

view Mr Harris pleads Romeo, Orsino, and even Antonio; and he does it so penetratingly that he convinces

you that Shakespear did betray himself again and again in these characters; but selfbetrayal is one thing; and

selfportrayal, as in Hamlet and Mercutio, is another. Shakespear never "saw himself," as actors say, in

Romeo or Orsino or Antonio. In Mr Harris's own play Shakespear is presented with the most pathetic

tenderness. He is tragic, bitter, pitiable, wretched and broken among a robust crowd of Jonsons and

Elizabeths; but to me he is not Shakespear because I miss the Shakespearian irony and the Shakespearian

gaiety. Take these away and Shakespear is no longer Shakespear: all the bite, the impetus, the strength, the

grim delight in his own power of looking terrible facts in the face with a chuckle, is gone; and you have

nothing left but that most depressing of all things: a victim. Now who can think of Shakespear as a man with

a grievance? Even in that most thoroughgoing and inspired of all Shakespear's loves: his love of music

(which Mr Harris has been the first to appreciate at anything like its value), there is a dash of mockery. "Spit

in the hole, man; and tune again." "Divine air! Now is his soul ravished. Is it not strange that sheep's guts

should hale the souls out of men's bodies?" "An he had been a dog that should have howled thus, they would

have hanged him." There is just as much Shakespear here as in the inevitable quotation about the sweet south

I lay stress on this irony of Shakespear's, this impish rejoicing in pessimism, this exultation in what breaks the

hearts of common men, not only because it is diagnostic of that immense energy of life which we call genius,

but because its omission is the one glaring defect in Mr Harris's otherwise extraordinarily penetrating book.

Fortunately, it is an omission that does not disable the book as (in my judgment) it disabled the hero of the

play, because Mr Harris left himself out of his play, whereas he pervades his book, mordant, deepvoiced,

There is even an advantage in having a book on Shakespear with the Shakespearian irony left out of account.

I do not say that the missing chapter should not be added in the next edition: the hiatus is too great: it leaves

the reader too uneasy before this touching picture of a writhing worm substituted for the invulnerable giant.

But it is none the less probable that in no other way could Mr Harris have got at his man as he has. For, after

all, what is the secret of the hopeless failure of the academic Bardolaters to give us a credible or even

interesting Shakespear, and the easy triumph of Mr Harris in giving us both? Simply that Mr Harris has

assumed that he was dealing with a man, whilst the others have assumed that they were writing about a god,

and have therefore rejected every consideration of fact, tradition, or interpretation, that pointed to any human

imperfection in their hero. They thus leave themselves with so little material that they are forced to begin by

saying that we know very little about Shakespear. As a matter of fact, with the plays and sonnets in our

hands, we know much more about Shakespear than we know about Dickens or Thackeray: the only difficulty

is that we deliberately suppress it because it proves that Shakespear was not only very unlike the conception

of a god current in Clapham, but was not, according to the same reckoning, even a respectable man. The

academic view starts with a Shakespear who was not scurrilous; therefore the verses about "lousy Lucy"

cannot have been written by him, and the cognate passages in the plays are either strokes of

characterdrawing or gags interpolated by the actors. This ideal Shakespear was too well behaved to get

drunk; therefore the tradition that his death was hastened by a drinking bout with Jonson and Drayton must be

rejected, and the remorse of Cassio treated as a thing observed, not experienced: nay, the disgust of Hamlet at

the drinking customs of Denmark is taken to establish Shakespear as the superior of Alexander in

Now this system of inventing your great man to start with, and then rejecting all the materials that do not fit

him, with the ridiculous result that you have to declare that there are no materials at all (with your

wastepaper basket full of them), ends in leaving Shakespear with a much worse character than he deserves.

For though it does not greatly matter whether he wrote the lousy Lucy lines or not, and does not really matter

at all whether he got drunk when he made a night of it with Jonson and Drayton, the sonnets raise an

unpleasant question which does matter a good deal; and the refusal of the academic Bardolaters to discuss or

even mention this question has had the effect of producing a silent verdict against Shakespear. Mr Harris

tackles the question openly, and has no difficulty whatever in convincing us that Shakespear was a man of

normal constitution sexually, and was not the victim of that most cruel and pitiable of all the freaks of nature:

the freak which transposes the normal aim of the affections. Silence on this point means condemnation; and

the condemnation has been general throughout the present generation, though it only needed Mr Harris's

fearless handling of the matter to sweep away what is nothing but a morbid and very disagreeable modern

fashion. There is always some stock accusation brought against eminent persons. When I was a boy every

wellknown man was accused of beating his wife. Later on, for some unexplained reason, he was accused of

psychopathic derangement. And this fashion is retrospective. The cases of Shakespear and Michel Angelo are

cited as proving that every genius of the first magnitude was a sufferer; and both here and in Germany there

are circles in which such derangement is grotesquely reverenced as part of the stigmata of heroic powers. All

of which is gross nonsense. Unfortunately, in Shakespear's case, prudery, which cannot prevent the

accusation from being whispered, does prevent the refutation from being shouted. Mr Harris, the

deepvoiced, refuses to be silenced. He dismisses with proper contempt the stupidity which places an

outrageous construction on Shakespear's apologies in the sonnets for neglecting that "perfect ceremony" of

love which consists in returning calls and making protestations and giving presents and paying the trumpery

attentions which men of genius always refuse to bother about, and to which touchy people who have no

genius attach so much importance. No leader who had not been tampered with by the psychopathic

monomaniacs could ever put any construction but the obvious and innocent one on these passages. But the

general vocabulary of the sonnets to Pembroke (or whoever "Mr W. H." really was) is so overcharged

That reply, which Mr Harris does not hesitate to give, is twofold: first, that Shakespear was, in his attitude

towards earls, a sycophant; and, second, that the normality of Shakespear's sexual constitution is only too

well attested by the excessive susceptibility to the normal impulse shewn in the whole mass of his writings.

This latter is the really conclusive reply. In the case of Michel Angelo, for instance, one must admit that if his

works are set beside those of Titian or Paul Veronese, it is impossible not to be struck by the absence in the

Florentine of that susceptibility to feminine charm which pervades the pictures of the Venetians. But, as Mr

Harris points out (though he does not use this particular illustration) Paul Veronese is an anchorite compared

to Shakespear. The language of the sonnets addressed to Pembroke, extravagant as it now seems, is the

language of compliment and fashion, transfigured no doubt by Shakespear's verbal magic, and hyperbolical,

as Shakespear always seems to people who cannot conceive so vividly as he, but still unmistakable for

anything else than the expression of a friendship delicate enough to be wounded, and a manly loyalty deep

enough to be outraged. But the language of the sonnets to the Dark Lady is the language of passion: their

cruelty shews it. There is no evidence that Shakespear was capable of being unkind in cold blood. But in his

revulsions from love, he was bitter, wounding, even ferocious; sparing neither himself nor the unfortunate

woman whose only offence was that she had reduced the great man to the common human denominator.

In seizing on these two points Mr Harris has made so sure a stroke, and placed his evidence so featly that

there is nothing left for me to do but to plead that the second is sounder than the first, which is, I think,

marked by the prevalent mistake as to Shakespear's social position, or, if you prefer it, the confusion between

his actual social position as a penniless tradesman's son taking to the theatre for a livelihood, and his own

conception of himself as a gentleman of good family. I am prepared to contend that though Shakespear was

undoubtedly sentimental in his expressions of devotion to Mr W. H. even to a point which nowadays makes

both ridiculous, he was not sycophantic if Mr W. H. was really attractive and promising, and Shakespear

deeply attached to him. A sycophant does not tell his patron that his fame will survive, not in the renown of

his own actions, but in the sonnets of his sycophant. A sycophant, when his patron cuts him out in a love

affair, does not tell his patron exactly what he thinks of him. Above all, a sycophant does not write to his

patron precisely as he feels on all occasions; and this rare kind of sincerity is all over the sonnets. Shakespear,

we are told, was "a very civil gentleman." This must mean that his desire to please people and be liked by

them, and his reluctance to hurt their feelings, led him into amiable flattery even when his feelings were not

strongly stirred. If this be taken into account along with the fact that Shakespear conceived and expressed all

his emotions with a vehemence that sometimes carried him into ludicrous extravagance, making Richard

we shall see more civility and hyperbole than sycophancy even in the earlier and more coldblooded sonnets.

Now take the general case pled against Shakespear as an enemy of democracy by Tolstoy, the late Ernest

Crosbie and others, and endorsed by Mr Harris. Will it really stand fire? Mr Harris emphasizes the passages

in which Shakespear spoke of mechanics and even of small master tradesmen as base persons whose clothes

were greasy, whose breath was rank, and whose political imbecility and caprice moved Coriolanus to say to

But let us be honest. As political sentiments these lines are an abomination to every democrat. But suppose

they are not political sentiments! Suppose they are merely a record of observed fact. John Stuart Mill told our

British workmen that they were mostly liars. Carlyle told us all that we are mostly fools. Matthew Arnold and

Ruskin were more circumstantial and more abusive. Everybody, including the workers themselves, know that

they are dirty, drunken, foulmouthed, ignorant, gluttonous, prejudiced: in short, heirs to the peculiar ills of

poverty and slavery, as well as coheirs with the plutocracy to all the failings of human nature. Even Shelley

admitted, 200 years after Shakespear wrote Coriolanus, that universal suffrage was out of the question. Surely

the real test, not of Democracy, which was not a live political issue in Shakespear's time, but of impartiality

in judging classes, which is what one demands from a great human poet, is not that he should flatter the poor

and denounce the rich, but that he should weigh them both in the same balance. Now whoever will read Lear

and Measure for Measure will find stamped on his mind such an appalled sense of the danger of dressing man

in a little brief authority, such a merciless stripping of the purple from the "poor, bare, forked animal" that

calls itself a king and fancies itself a god, that one wonders what was the real nature of the mysterious

restraint that kept "Eliza and our James" from teaching Shakespear to be civil to crowned heads, just as one

wonders why Tolstoy was allowed to go free when so many less terrible levellers went to the galleys or

Siberia. From the mature Shakespear we get no such scenes of village snobbery as that between the stage

country gentleman Alexander Iden and the stage Radical Jack Cade. We get the shepherd in As You Like It,

and many honest, brave, human, and loyal servants, beside the inevitable comic ones. Even in the Jingo play,

Henry V, we get Bates and Williams drawn with all respect and honor as normal rank and file men. In Julius

Caesar, Shakespear went to work with a will when he took his cue from Plutarch in glorifying regicide and

transfiguring the republicans. Indeed heroworshippers have never forgiven him for belittling Caesar and

failing to see that side of his assassination which made Goethe denounce it as the most senseless of crimes.

Put the play beside the Charles I of Wills, in which Cromwell is written down to a point at which the Jack

Cade of Henry VI becomes a hero in comparison; and then believe, if you can, that Shakespear was one of

them that "crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where thrift may follow fawning." Think of Rosencrantz,

Guildenstern, Osric, the fop who annoyed Hotspur, and a dozen passages concerning such people! If such

evidence can prove anything (and Mr Harris relies throughout on such evidence) Shakespear loathed

If, on the other hand, Shakespear's characters are mostly members of the leisured classes, the same thing is

true of Mr Harris's own plays and mine. Industrial slavery is not compatible with that freedom of adventure,

that personal refinement and intellectual culture, that scope of action, which the higher and subtler drama

Even Cervantes had finally to drop Don Quixote's troubles with innkeepers demanding to be paid for his food

and lodging, and make him as free of economic difficulties as Amadis de Gaul. Hamlet's experiences simply

could not have happened to a plumber. A poor man is useful on the stage only as a blind man is: to excite

sympathy. The poverty of the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet produces a great effect, and even points the

sound moral that a poor man cannot afford to have a conscience; but if all the characters of the play had been

as poor as he, it would have been nothing but a melodrama of the sort that the Sicilian players gave us here;

and that was not the best that lay in Shakespear's power. When poverty is abolished, and leisure and grace of

life become general, the only plays surviving from our epoch which will have any relation to life as it will be

lived then will be those in which none of the persons represented are troubled with want of money or

wretched drudgery. Our plays of poverty and squalor, now the only ones that are true to the life of the

majority of living men, will then be classed with the records of misers and monsters, and read only by

Then consider Shakespear's kings and lords and gentlemen! Would even John Ball or Jeremiah complain that

they are flattered? Surely a more mercilessly exposed string of scoundrels never crossed the stage. The very

monarch who paralyzes a rebel by appealing to the divinity that hedges a king, is a drunken and sensual

assassin, and is presently killed contemptuously before our eyes in spite of his hedge of divinity. I could write

as convincing a chapter on Shakespear's Dickensian prejudice against the throne and the nobility and gentry

in general as Mr Harris or Ernest Crosbie on the other side. I could even go so far as to contend that one of

Shakespear's defects is his lack of an intelligent comprehension of feudalism. He had of course no prevision

of democratic Collectivism. He was, except in the commonplaces of war and patriotism, a privateer through

and through. Nobody in his plays, whether king or citizen, has any civil public business or conception of such

a thing, except in the method of appointing constables, to the abuses in which he called attention quite in the

vein of the Fabian Society. He was concerned about drunkenness and about the idolatry and hypocrisy of our

judicial system; but his implied remedy was personal sobriety and freedom from idolatrous illusion in so far

as he had any remedy at all, and did not merely despair of human nature. His first and last word on parliament

was "Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see the thing thou dost not." He had no notion

of the feeling with which the land nationalizers of today regard the fact that he was a party to the enclosure of

common lands at Wellcome. The explanation is, not a general deficiency in his mind, but the simple fact that

in his day what English land needed was individual appropriation and cultivation, and what the English

Constitution needed was the incorporation of Whig principles of individual liberty.

I have rejected Mr Harris's view that Shakespear died brokenhearted of "the pangs of love despised." I have

given my reasons for believing that Shakespear died game, and indeed in a state of levity which would have

been considered unbecoming in a bishop. But Mr Harris's evidence does prove that Shakespear had a

grievance and a very serious one. He might have been jilted by ten dark ladies and been none the worse for it;

but his treatment by the British Public was another matter. The idolatry which exasperated Ben Jonson was

by no means a popular movement; and, like all such idolatries, it was excited by the magic of Shakespear's art

He was launched on his career as a successful playwright by the Henry VI trilogy, a work of no originality,

depth, or subtlety except the originality, depth, and subtlety of the feelings and fancies of the common people.

But Shakespear was not satisfied with this. What is the use of being Shakespear if you are not allowed to

express any notions but those of Autolycus? Shakespear did not see the world as Autolycus did: he saw it, if

not exactly as Ibsen did (for it was not quite the same world), at least with much of Ibsen's power of

penetrating its illusions and idolatries, and with all Swift's horror of its cruelty and uncleanliness.

Now it happens to some men with these powers that they are forced to impose their fullest exercise on the

world because they cannot produce popular work. Take Wagner and Ibsen for instance! Their earlier works

are no doubt much cheaper than their later ones; still, they were not popular when they were written. The

alternative of doing popular work was never really open to them: had they stooped they would have picked

up less than they snatched from above the people's heads. But Handel and Shakespear were not held to their

best in this way. They could turn out anything they were asked for, and even heap up the measure. They

reviled the British Public, and never forgave it for ignoring their best work and admiring their splendid

commonplaces; but they produced the commonplaces all the same, and made them sound magnificent by

mere brute faculty for their art. When Shakespear was forced to write popular plays to save his theatre from

ruin, he did it mutinously, calling the plays "As You Like It," and "Much Ado About Nothing." All the same,

he did it so well that to this day these two genial vulgarities are the main Shakespearian stockintrade of our

theatres. Later on Burbage's power and popularity as an actor enabled Shakespear to free himself from the

tyranny of the box office, and to express himself more freely in plays consisting largely of monologue to be

spoken by a great actor from whom the public would stand a good deal. The history of Shakespear's tragedies

has thus been the history of a long line of famous actors, from Burbage and Betterton to Forbes Robertson;

and the man of whom we are told that "when he would have said that Richard died, and cried A horse! A

horse! he Burbage cried" was the father of nine generations of Shakespearian playgoers, all speaking of

Garrick's Richard, and Kean's Othello, and Irving's Shylock, and Forbes Robertson's Hamlet without knowing

or caring how much these had to do with Shakespear's Richard and Othello and so forth. And the plays which

were written without great and predominant parts, such as Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well,

and Measure for Measure, have dropped on our stage as dead as the second part of Goethe's Faust or Ibsen's

Here, then, Shakespear had a real grievance; and though it is a sentimental exaggeration to describe him as a

brokenhearted man in the face of the passages of reckless jollity and serenely happy poetry in his latest

plays, yet the discovery that his most serious work could reach success only when carried on the back of a

very fascinating actor who was enormously overcharging his part, and that the serious plays which did not

contain parts big enough to hold the overcharge were left on the shelf, amply accounts for the evident fact

that Shakespear did not end his life in a glow of enthusiastic satisfaction with mankind and with the theatre,

which is all that Mr Harris can allege in support of his brokenheart theory. But even if Shakespear had had

no failures, it was not possible for a man of his powers to observe the political and moral conduct of his

contemporaries without perceiving that they were incapable of dealing with the problems raised by their own

civilization, and that their attempts to carry out the codes of law and to practise the religions offered to them

by great prophets and lawgivers were and still are so foolish that we now call for The Superman, virtually a

new species, to rescue the world from mismanagement. This is the real sorrow of great men; and in the face

of it the notion that when a great man speaks bitterly or looks melancholy he must be troubled by a

If I have carried the reader with me thus far, he will find that trivial as this little play of mine is, its sketch of

Shakespear is more complete than its levity suggests. Alas! its appeal for a National Theatre as a monument

to Shakespear failed to touch the very stupid people who cannot see that a National Theatre is worth having

for the sake of the National Soul. I had unfortunately represented Shakespear as treasuring and using (as I do

myself) the jewels of unconsciously musical speech which common people utter and throw away every day;

and this was taken as a disparagement of Shakespear's "originality." Why was I born with such

The Dark Lady of The Sonnets was first performed at the Haymarket Theatre, on the afternoon of Thursday,

the 24th November 1910, by Mona Limerick as the Dark Lady, Suzanne Sheldon as Queen Elizabeth,

Fin de siecle 151600. Midsummer night on the terrace of the Palace at Whitehall, overlooking the Thames.

THE BEEFEATER. Then cannot you pass here. What is your business? Who are you? Are you a true man?

THE MAN. Far from it, Master Warder. I am not the same man two days together: sometimes Adam,

THE MAN. Well said, Master Warder. With your leave I will set that down in writing; for I have a very poor

and unhappy brain for remembrance. [He takes out his tablets and writes]. Methinks this is a good scene, with

you on your lonely watch, and I approaching like a ghost in the moonlight. Stare not so amazedly at me; but

mark what I say. I keep tryst here tonight with a dark lady. She promised to bribe the warder. I gave her the

THE MAN. [detaching a tablet] My friend: present this tablet, and you will be welcomed at any time when

the plays of Will Shakespear are in hand. Bring your wife. Bring your friends. Bring the whole garrison.

THE BEEFEATER. I care not for these newfangled plays. No man can understand a word of them. They

THE MAN. To see The Spanish Tragedy one pays, my friend. Here are the means. [He gives him a piece of

THE BEEFEATER. [overwhelmed] Gold! Oh, sir, you are a better paymaster than your dark lady.

THE BEEFEATER. Tis so, sir. And you have to consider that the most open handed of us must een cheapen

that which we buy every day. This lady has to make a present to a warder nigh every night of her life.

THE BEEFEATER. Now you, sir, I dare be sworn, do not have an adventure like this twice in the year.

THE MAN. Villain: wouldst tell me that my dark lady hath ever done thus before? that she maketh occasions

THE BEEFEATER. Now the Lord bless your innocence, sir, do you think you are the only pretty man in the

world? A merry lady, sir: a warm bit of stuff. Go to: I'll not see her pass a deceit on a gentleman that hath

THE MAN. Master Warder: is it not a strange thing that we, knowing that all women are false, should be

THE BEEFEATER. You judge too much by the Court, sir. There, indeed, you may say of frailty that its

THE MAN. [pulling out his tablets again] Prithee say that again: that about frailty: the strain of music.

THE MAN. There is music in your soul: many of your degree have it very notably. [Writing] "Frailty: thy

THE BEEFEATER. Well, sir, it is but four words. Are you a snapperup of such unconsidered trifles?

THE MAN. [eagerly] Snapperup of [he gasps] Oh! Immortal phrase! [He writes it down]. This man is a

THE MAN. Tis ever so. Twas ever so. [He turns away, overcome]. Two Gentlemen of Verona! Judas!

THE MAN. [recovering his charity and selfpossession] Bad? Oh no. Human, Master Warder, human. We

THE BEEFEATER. Ay, sir: words, words, words. Mere wind, sir. We fill our bellies with the east wind, sir,

THE BEEFEATER. You speak strangely, sir: no offence. But, an't like you, you are a very civil gentleman;

and a poor man feels drawn to you, you being, as twere, willing to share your thought with him.

THE MAN. Tis my trade. But alas! the world for the most part will none of my thoughts.

THE BEEFEATER. Here comes your lady, sir. I'll to t'other end of my ward. You may een take your time

about your business: I shall not return too suddenly unless my sergeant comes prowling round. Tis a fell

THE MAN. "Strict in his arrest"! "Fell sergeant"! [As if tasting a ripe plum] Oooh! [He makes a note of

A Cloaked Lady gropes her way from the palace and wanders along the terrace, walking in her sleep.

THE LADY. [rubbing her hands as if washing them] Out, damned spot. You will mar all with these

cosmetics. God made you one face; and you make yourself another. Think of your grave, woman, not ever of

THE MAN. "All the perfumes of Arabia"! "Beautified"! "Beautified"! a poem in a single word. Can this be

my Mary? [To the Lady] Why do you speak in a strange voice, and utter poetry for the first time? Are you

THE LADY. [echoing him] Mary! Mary! Who would have thought that woman to have had so much blood

in her! Is it my fault that my counsellors put deeds of blood on me? Fie! If you were women you would have

more wit than to stain the floor so foully. Hold not up her head so: the hair is false. I tell you yet again,

Mary's buried: she cannot come out of her grave. I fear her not: these cats that dare jump into thrones though

they be fit only for men's laps must be put away. Whats done cannot be undone. Out, I say. Fie! a queen, and

THE MAN. I cry your mercy. I have mistook your person all this while. Methought you were my Mary: my

THE MAN. Be not wroth with me, lady. My mistress is a marvellous proper woman. But she does not speak

so well as you. "All the perfumes of Arabia"! That was well said: spoken with good accent and excellent

THE MAN. Walk ever in your sleep, fair one; for then your words drop like honey.

THE LADY. [with cold majesty] Know you to whom you speak, sir, that you dare express yourself so

THE MAN. [unabashed] Not I, not care neither. You are some lady of the Court, belike. To me there are but

two sorts of women: those with excellent voices, sweet and low, and cackling hens that cannot make me

dream. Your voice has all manner of loveliness in it. Grudge me not a short hour of its music.

THE MAN. Tis music. Can you not hear? When a good musician sings a song, do you not sing it and sing it

again till you have caught and fixed its perfect melody? Season your admiration for a while": God! the

history of man's heart is in that one word admiration. Admiration! [Taking up his tablets] What was it?

THE MAN. [hastily] Season: ay, season, season, season. Plague on my memory, my wretched memory! I

must een write it down. [He begins to write, but stops, his memory failing him]. Yet tell me which was the

vile jingle? You said very justly: mine own ear caught it even as my false tongue said it.

THE MAN. "For a while" [he corrects it]. Good! [Ardently] And now be mine neither for a space nor a

THE MAN. Nay: tis you who have made the love: I but pour it out at your feet. I cannot but love a lass that

sets such store by an apt word. Therefore vouchsafe, divine perfection of a womanno: I have said that

THE LADY. You talk too much, sir. Let me warn you: I am more accustomed to be listened to than preached

THE MAN. The most are like that that do talk well. But though you spake with the tongues of angels, as

THE MAN. What nobler name can I tender you? How else can I love you? Yet you may well shrink from the

name: have I not said we are but poor things? Yet there is a power that can redeem us.

THE MAN. This is no sermon, but the living truth. The power I speak of is the power of immortal poesy. For

know that vile as this world is, and worms as we are, you have but to invest all this vileness with a magical

garment of words to transfigure us and uplift our souls til earth flowers into a million heavens.

THE LADY. You spoil your heaven with your million. You are extravagant. Observe some measure in your

THE MAN. A learned bricklayer who thinks that the sky is at the top of his ladder, and so takes it on him to

rebuke me for flying. I tell you there is no word yet coined and no melody yet sung that is extravagant and

majestical enough for the glory that lovely words can reveal. It is heresy to deny it: have you not been taught

that in the beginning was the Word? that the Word was with God? nay, that the Word was God?

THE LADY. Beware, fellow, how you presume to speak of holy things. The Queen is the head of the

THE MAN. You are the head of my Church when you speak as you did at first. "All the perfumes of

Arabia"! Can the Queen speak thus? They say she playeth well upon the virginals. Let her play so to me; and

I'll kiss her hands. But until then, you are my Queen; and I'll kiss those lips that have dropt music on my

The Dark Lady comes stooping along the terrace behind them like a running thrush. When she sees how they

THE MAN. [unaware of the Dark Lady] Then cease to make my hands tremble with the streams of life you

pour through them. You hold me as the lodestar holds the iron: I cannot but cling to you. We are lost, you and

THE DARK LADY. We shall see that, false lying hound, you and your filthy trull. [With two vigorous

cuffs, she knocks the pair asunder, sending the man, who is unlucky enough to receive a righthanded blow,

THE CLOAKED LADY. [in towering wrath, throwing off her cloak and turning in outraged majesty on her

THE DARK LADY. [recognizing her and falling on her knees in abject terror] Will: I am lost: I have struck

THE MAN. [sitting up as majestically as his ignominious posture allows] Woman: you have struck

QUEEN ELIZABETH. [stupent] Marry, come up!!! Struck William Shakespear quotha! And who in the

name of all the sluts and jades and lighto'loves and flybynights that infest this palace of mine, may

QUEEN ELIZABETH. Belike you will, mistress. Have you bethought you that I am like to have your head

ELIZABETH. Save you! A likely savior, on my royal word! I had thought this fellow at least an esquire; for

I had hoped that even the vilest of my ladies would not have dishonored my Court by wantoning with a

SHAKESPEAR. [indignantly scrambling to his feet] Baseborn! I, a Shakespear of Stratford! I, whose

THE DARK LADY. [rising from her knees and throwing herself between them] Will: in God's name anger

SHAKESPEAR. Not were it een to save your life, Mary, not to mention mine own, will I flatter a monarch

who forgets what is due to my family. I deny not that my father was brought down to be a poor bankrupt; but

twas his gentle blood that was ever too generous for trade. Never did he disown his debts. Tis true he paid

them not; but it is an attested truth that he gave bills for them; and twas those bills, in the hands of base

ELIZABETH. [grimly] The son of your father shall learn his place in the presence of the daughter of Harry

SHAKESPEAR. [swelling with intolerant importance] Name not that inordinate man in the same breath with

Stratford's worthiest alderman. John Shakespear wedded but once: Harry Tudor was married six times. You

SHAKESPEAR. [cutting them short] How know you that King Harry was indeed your father?

SHAKESPEAR. Learn to know yourself better, madam. I am an honest gentleman of unquestioned

parentage, and have already sent in my demand for the coatofarms that is lawfully mine. Can you say as

ELIZABETH. [almost beside herself] Another word; and I begin with mine own hands the work the

SHAKESPEAR. You are no true Tudor: this baggage here has as good a right to your royal seat as you.

What maintains you on the throne of England? Is it your renowned wit? your wisdom that sets at naught the

craftiest statesmen of the Christian world? No. Tis the mere chance that might have happened to any

milkmaid, the caprice of Nature that made you the most wondrous piece of beauty the age hath seen.

[Elizabeth's raised fists, on the point of striking him, fall to her side]. That is what hath brought all men to

your feet, and founded your throne on the impregnable rock of your proud heart, a stony island in a sea of

desire. There, madam, is some wholesome blunt honest speaking for you. Now do your worst.

ELIZABETH. [with dignity] Master Shakespear: it is well for you that I am a merciful prince. I make

allowance for your rustic ignorance. But remember that there are things which be true, and are yet not seemly

to be said (I will not say to a queen; for you will have it that I am none) but to a virgin.

SHAKESPEAR. [bluntly] It is no fault of mine that you are a virgin, madam, albeit tis my misfortune.

THE DARK LADY. [terrified again] In mercy, madam, hold no further discourse with him. He hath ever

some lewd jest on his tongue. You hear how he useth me! calling me baggage and the like to your Majesty's

ELIZABETH. As for you, mistress, I have yet to demand what your business is at this hour in this place, and

how you come to be so concerned with a player that you strike blindly at your sovereign in your jealousy of

THE DARK LADY. [angrily] ay, I'm as like to be saved as thou that believest naught save some black

magic of words and versesI say, madam, as I am a living woman I came here to break with him for ever.

Oh, madam, if you would know what misery is, listen to this man that is more than man and less at the same

time. He will tie you down to anatomize your very soul: he will wring tears of blood from your humiliation;

SHAKESPEAR. Flatteries! [Kneeling] Oh, madam, I put my case at your royal feet. I confess to much. I

have a rude tongue: I am unmannerly: I blaspheme against the holiness of anointed royalty; but oh, my royal

ELIZABETH. I absolve you as to that. You are far too plain a dealer to please me. [He rises gratefully].

SHAKESPEAR. Madam: she is jealous; and, heaven help me! not without reason. Oh, you say you are a

merciful prince; but that was cruel of you, that hiding of your royal dignity when you found me here. For how

can I ever be content with this blackhaired, blackeyed, blackavised devil again now that I have looked

THE DARK LADY. [wounded and desperate] He hath swore to me ten times over that the day shall come in

England when black women, for all their foulness, shall be more thought on than fair ones. [To Shakespear,

scolding at him] Deny it if thou canst. Oh, he is compact of lies and scorns. I am tired of being tossed up to

heaven and dragged down to hell at every whim that takes him. I am ashamed to my very soul that I have

abased myself to love one that my father would not have deemed fit to hold my stirrupone that will talk to

all the world about methat will put my love and my shame into his plays and make me blush for myself

therethat will write sonnets about me that no man of gentle strain would put his hand to. I am all

disordered: I know not what I am saying to your Majesty: I am of all ladies most deject and wretched

SHAKESPEAR. Ha! At last sorrow hath struck a note of music out of thee. "Of all ladies most deject and

THE DARK LADY. Madam: I implore you give me leave to go. I am distracted with grief and shame. I

ELIZABETH. Go [The Dark Lady tries to kiss her hand]. No more. Go. [The Dark Lady goes, convulsed].

SHAKESPEAR. I am not truel, madam; but you know the fable of Jupiter and Semele. I could not help my

ELIZABETH. You have an overweening conceit of yourself, sir, that displeases your Queen.

SHAKESPEAR. Oh, madam, can I go about with the modest cough of a minor poet, belittling my

inspiration and making the mightiest wonder of your reign a thing of nought? I have said that "not marble nor

the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive" the words with which I make the world glorious or foolish at

ELIZABETH. I hope it is a boon that may be asked of a virgin Queen without offence, sir. I mistrust your

forwardness; and I bid you remember that I do not suffer persons of your degree (if I may say so without

SHAKESPEAR. Oh, madam, I shall not forget myself again; though by my life, could I make you a serving

wench, neither a queen nor a virgin should you be for so much longer as a flash of lightning might take to

cross the river to the Bankside. But since you are a queen and will none of me, nor of Philip of Spain, nor of

any other mortal man, I must een contain myself as best I may, and ask you only for a boon of State.

ELIZABETH. A boon of State already! You are becoming a courtier like the rest of them. You lack

SHAKESPEAR. "Lack advancement." By your Majesty's leave: a queenly phrase. [He is about to write it

ELIZABETH. [striking the tablets from his hand] Your tables begin to anger me, sir. I am not here to write

SHAKESPEAR. You are here to inspire them, madam. For this, among the rest, were you ordained. But the

boon I crave is that you do endow a great playhouse, or, if I may make bold to coin a scholarly name for it, a

National Theatre, for the better instruction and gracing of your Majesty's subjects.

ELIZABETH. Why, sir, are there not theatres enow on the Bankside and in Blackfriars?

SHAKESPEAR. Madam: these are the adventures of needy and desperate men that must, to save themselves

from perishing of want, give the sillier sort of people what they best like; and what they best like, God

knows, is not their own betterment and instruction, as we well see by the example of the churches, which

must needs compel men to frequent them, though they be open to all without charge. Only when there is a

matter of a murder, or a plot, or a pretty youth in petticoats, or some naughty tale of wantonness, will your

subjects pay the great cost of good players and their finery, with a little profit to boot. To prove this I will tell

you that I have written two noble and excellent plays setting forth the advancement of women of high nature

and fruitful industry even as your Majesty is: the one a skilful physician, the other a sister devoted to good

works. I have also stole from a book of idle wanton tales two of the most damnable foolishnesses in the

world, in the one of which a woman goeth in man's attire and maketh impudent love to her swain, who

pleaseth the groundlings by overthrowing a wrestler; whilst, in the other, one of the same kidney sheweth her

wit by saying endless naughtinesses to a gentleman as lewd as herself. I have writ these to save my friends

from penury, yet shewing my scorn for such follies and for them that praise them by calling the one As You

Like It, meaning that it is not as I like it, and the other Much Ado About Nothing, as it truly is. And now

these two filthy pieces drive their nobler fellows from the stage, where indeed I cannot have my lady

physician presented at all, she being too honest a woman for the taste of the town. Wherefore I humbly beg

your Majesty to give order that a theatre be endowed out of the public revenue for the playing of those pieces

of mine which no merchant will touch, seeing that his gain is so much greater with the worse than with the

better. Thereby you shall also encourage other men to undertake the writing of plays who do now despise it

and leave it wholly to those whose counsels will work little good to your realm. For this writing of plays is a

great matter, forming as it does the minds and affections of men in such sort that whatsoever they see done in

show on the stage, they will presently be doing in earnest in the world, which is but a larger stage. Of late, as

you know, the Church taught the people by means of plays; but the people flocked only to such as were full

of superstitious miracles and bloody martyrdoms; and so the Church, which also was just then brought into

straits by the policy of your royal father, did abandon and discountenance the art of playing; and thus it fell

into the hands of poor players and greedy merchants that had their pockets to look to and not the greatness of

this your kingdom. Therefore now must your Majesty take up that good work that your Church hath

ELIZABETH. Master Shakespear: I will speak of this matter to the Lord Treasurer.

SHAKESPEAR. Then am I undone, madam; for there was never yet a Lord Treasurer that could find a

penny for anything over and above the necessary expenses of your government, save for a war or a salary for

ELIZABETH. Master Shakespear: you speak sooth; yet cannot I in any wise mend it. I dare not offend my

unruly Puritans by making so lewd a place as the playhouse a public charge; and there be a thousand things to

be done in this London of mine before your poetry can have its penny from the general purse. I tell thee,

Master Will, it will be three hundred years and more before my subjects learn that man cannot live by bread

alone, but by every word that cometh from the mouth of those whom God inspires. By that time you and I

will be dust beneath the feet of the horses, if indeed there be any horses then, and men be still riding instead

ELIZABETH. It may prove so. But of this I am certain (for I know my countrymen) that until every other

country in the Christian world, even to barbarian Muscovy and the hamlets of the boorish Germans, have its

playhouse at the public charge, England will never adventure. And she will adventure then only because it is

her desire to be ever in the fashion, and to do humbly and dutifully whatso she seeth everybody else doing. In

the meantime you must content yourself as best you can by the playing of those two pieces which you give

out as the most damnable ever writ, but which your countrymen, I warn you, will swear are the best you have

ever done. But this I will say, that if I could speak across the ages to our descendants, I should heartily

recommend them to fulfil your wish; for the Scottish minstrel hath well said that he that maketh the songs of

a nation is mightier than he that maketh its laws; and the same may well be true of plays and interludes. [The

clock chimes the first quarter. The warder returns on his round]. And now, sir, we are upon the hour when it

better beseems a virgin queen to be abed than to converse alone with the naughtiest of her subjects. Ho there!

ELIZABETH. See that you keep it better in future. You have let pass a most dangerous gallant even to the

very door of our royal chamber. Lead him forth; and bring me word when he is safely locked out; for I shall

SHAKESPEAR. [kissing her hand] My body goes through the gate into the darkness, madam; but my

SHAKESPEAR. No, madam, to your prayers, in which I beg you to remember my theatre.

ELIZABETH. That is my prayer to posterity. Forget not your own to God; and so goodnight, Master Will.

Exeunt severally: she to her chamber: he, in custody of the warder, to the gate nearest Blackfriars.