ing the part in an auburn wig, which Fechter resurrected. Charles Young was impetuous rather than ruminative. Kean introduced the business of kissing Ophelia's hand after the "Get thee to a nunnery" speeches. Macready carried a cambric handkerchief always ready to his eye to depict the melancholy Dane, and Junius Brutus Booth is said to have never played the part twice alike, so mighty were his inspirations. Fechter made the fencing scene great by using a double staircase, making the King attempt to escape at Laertes' confession, but be met and dispatched by Hamlet; and we need not pause to re-catalogue the points of Mr. Booth or Mr. Irving. In other words, each actor of the part has distinguished his own abilities and rounded his performance out to them.

My own idea is, that this was the exact case in and about Shakespeare's own days: that Elizabethan audiences welcomed and appreciated the merits of a new point in stage business quite as heartily as do our own. In the recently unearthed "Pilgrimage to Parnassus," acted by the students of St. John's College at Cambridge, prior to December, 1597, there occurs the following:

Enter DROMO, drawing a clowne in with a rope.

Clowne. What now? thrust a man into the commonwealthe whether hee will or noe? what the devill should I doe here?

Dromo. Why, what an asse art thou! Dost thou not know a playe cannot be without a clowne? Clownes have bene thrust into plays by head and shoulders ever since Kempe could make a scurvy face; and therefore reason thou shouldst be drawn in with a cart rope.

Clowne. But what must I doe nowe?

Dromo. Why, if thou canst but draw thy mouth awrye, laye thy legg over thy staffe, sawe a peece of cheese asunder with thy dagger, lape up drinke on the earth, I warrant thee theile laughe mightilie.

The travesty on contemporary stage methods here is worthy of the best modern burlesque, and if its point could be appreciated by an audience of the sixteenth century, it is not impossible that there might have been more than one popular way of playing Hamlet. Perhaps Ophelia was the mad person of the piece, and not the prince, who-as indeed he himself hints rather broadly to the conspirators-ought not to be set down as clean crazy; is only mad north northwest; but, when the wind is southerly, knows a hawk from a hand-saw.

VIII

Queen Elizabeth's Share in the "Merrp Wives of Windsor

HE selecting of periods of moods and motives for William Shakespeare from the meters or prosodies in the plays, or assignment to him of occult and opaque philosophies from what may be only printers' slips, while requiring a certain amount of ingenuity at the outset, soon becomes a habitude, and goes of itself. There is nothing in it-at least so it appears to me- higher in quality or degree than that lowest of all low grade Shakespearean criticism which sorts out sentiments from the text to prove their author an angler, butcher, soldier, Sunday-school teacher, teetotaler, and the like. The mastery of human nature and of human passion, which is generally accorded to a Shakespeare, might have been, and possibly was, inclusive of literary facility, not to say ear, enough to have enabled him to write in what prosodiacal

form he pleased, independently of the universe or the almanac: while he seems to have been rather too fond of his share of the takings at the door to have emptied his playhouses, proscenium and gallery alike, by mounting abstract ætiologies in place of the sanguinary or burlesque or pasquinado material the people loved.

But, however we may evade it, there is one characteristic of all these Shakespeare plays, quite too constant, incessant, and emphatic to be overlooked. There can be no disguising the fact that Shakespeare never missed an opportunity to testify how he despised the people-slurred, slandered, and lampooned them; denied their very right to lie side by side with men nobly born upon their country's battle-fields. That the lowly has no right the lordly is bound to respect; the scriptural doctrine that to him that hath shall be given, while from him who hath not shall be taken away even that he hath; these are the only propositions upon which every one of Shakespeare's eight hundred personages agree; they speak their own thoughts (not Shakespeare's) as to everything else. But on these fundamentals they all preach in common, and always one way. Except in Adam (in "As You Like It"), Shakespeare never extols or praises virtue in anything less than a lord. But in Adam it is his willingness to give his noble master all his savings and to serve him without pay, that is pronounced commendable. "In all Shakespeare," says Mr. Davis, "there is nowhere a hint of sympathy with personal rights as against the sovereign, nor with parliament, then first assuming its protective attitude toward the Eng

lish people; nor with the few judges who, like Coke, showed a glorious obstinacy in their resistance to the prerogative. In all his works there is not one word for direct liberty of speech, thought, religion those rights which in his age were the very seeds of time, into which his eye, of all men's, could best look to see which grain would grow and which would not."

"The doctrine of Coriolanus," says Hazlitt, "is that those who have little shall have less, and those that have much shall take all that the others have left. The people are poor, therefore they ought to be starved; they work hard, therefore they ought to be treated like beasts of burden. They are ignorant, therefore they ought not to be allowed to feel that they want food or clothing or rest, or that they are enslaved or oppressed or miserable. Shakespeare had a leaning to the aristocratic principle, inasmuch as he does not dwell on the truth he tells of the nobles in the same proportion as he does on those he tells of the people." "Lords! lords! lords!" says Mr. Wilkes, "and the people always and everywhere are scabs and hedge-born swains." "You will generally find that when a citizen is mentioned, he is made to do or say something absurd," says Bagehot. Even in the comedies (where no political motive can be construed as preaching that the people are better off in suffering any indignity rather than meddle with the order and sovereignty of class) no opportunity is lost. "Go bring the rabble" ("The Tempest"). "Yet I have much to do to keep [the people] from uncivil outrages" ("Two Gentlemen of Verona "). "What hempen homespuns have we