Sectarianism his universal sympathy. the variety of theories which have been promulgated with regard to Shakespeare's religion. One book has been written to prove that he was a Papist; another that he was a Protestant; a third, that he was a Puritan,—or at least of Puritan family; a fourth, that he was an atheist. Have we not here a sufficient caution against joining in the wild-goose-chase by which men have sought to decide when the dramatist is expressing his own convictions and when not? Any such theory can at best be held tentatively, and no dogmatic affirmation is tolerable. We must guide ourselves not by a phrase here and there, but by the general trend of the plays. We must seek to elicit the broad conception of man and the universe which is indicated by a consideration of all of them together. One is almost tempted to declare that the four volumes which claim Shakespeare as an adherent of four different religious schools succeed collectively in proving that he belonged to none of those schools. But this again would be an unwarrantable stretch of inference. The improbability, however, of his having been a excluded by dogmatic upholder of any special set of theological or anti-theological beliefs is strongly suggested by the fact that he was indubitably one of the greatest of humanists. I use this term not to denote any particular philosophic or theological theory, but to indicate that capacity for delighted interest in and sympathetic self-identification with all things human which is vouched for by his dramatic achievement. He does not tell us that nothing human is alien to him, but he proves it by his creations. He has the inner secret of every creature he portrays; he lives in each of them successively. Men and women, old and young, kings and queens, soldiers, statesmen, ecclesiastics, royalists and republicans, Alsatian sharpers and bucolic buffoons, -all alike are brought to life before us, in their habits as they lived, with appropriate thought and characteristic speech, limned as they would have been proud to depict themselves. His kings are more majestic than their historic prototypes; his cockney tavern-haunters are as funny as any of the wonderful people of Dickens, and more lifelike. This is why we call him a humanist. The term in his case is not an intellectual pigeon-hole, but a psychological label. As regards ultimate problems, theological or philosophical, Shakespeare's attitude would seem to have been permanently governed by a reverent awareness of the limitations of human knowledge, both actual and possible. I do not mean that he was irreligious or anti-religious; on the contrary, this non-dogmatic attitude in him, as in many other great men, was a profoundly religious one. There has been far too much talking about God as though He were (to use Matthew Arnold's expression) a man in the next street; and stories of miraculous interventions on behalf of particular persons or causes are commonly less an expression of faith than of egoism on the part of those who tell them. His contempt for religious cocksureness. ences to miracles and Now, Shakespeare cannot for a moment be de- His referclared a disbeliever in the possibility or the occurrence of miracles; but again and again in his plays portents. he seizes opportunities to rebuke the towering presumption of persons who asserted that the order of nature had been interrupted for their behoof. One or two such passages I have found occasion to cite in preceding chapters. The remarks of Julius Caesar, concerning the prodigious portents which disturbed his wife and others, are further illustra Problem of his attitude regarding Hamlet's tions of this recurrent thought. In the First Part of King Henry IV, the merciless chaffing by Hotspur of the braggart Glendower is yet another case in point. We have seen, too, how invariably Shakespeare treats supernormal or supernatural manifestations as mere incidental or accidental parallels to a moral drama which is begun, continued and ended wholly within the souls of men and women. The deliverances of his characters on the question of human immortality are so various that, here immortality. again, we may not confidently dogmatize as to his own beliefs. The Ghost of Hamlet's father describes himself as enduring purgatorial punishment, in terms of the orthodox theological doctrine; yet Hamlet, later on, soliloquizes about the after-life in a decidedly agnostic fashion. At the close of the play, again, we find Hamlet with his dying breath declaring, "The rest is silence." This would not be dying words. worthy of remark, were it not that in the first quarto edition of the tragedy, instead of these words, we have, "Heaven receive my soul." The imperfections of that version, however, are so glaring that we may not confidently conclude this to have been the form in which Shakespeare originally penned the line. On the other hand, it would be difficult to over-stress the significance of such a sentence as that oft-quoted one of Prospero, the character who seems most of all to resemble Shakespeare, in his apology to Ferdinand after the disappearance of the vision: Prospero's agnosticism. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. On this subject, cp. the author's Religion of Experience, pp. 103-4. (New York: Macmillans, 1916.) The man to whom such thoughts were familiar companions must at least have been one who did his thinking for himself, and did it with much greater independence of traditional teaching than was general in his day. As to Shakespearean deliverances on the subjects Shakeof politics and national patriotism, the common opin- speare's alleged ion (that the poet was a snobbish and sycophantic sycophancy king-worshipper) would seem to be somewhat undis- to kings. criminating. A full analysis of his historical plays, of the characters of his kings, and of his attitude towards them, would be needed before one could pronounce on the subject with anything like confidence; and such a study I am at present unable to undertake, though I am not without hope of finding opportunity for it in a future volume. Here it may be remarked that a man who had such unparalleled insight as Shakespeare into human nature, cannot conceivably have been imposed upon by titles and trappings after the fashion of the average superstitious monarchist. He often uses the conventional language of his time, to be sure; and, as a man of business, he was not above resorting upon occasion to the flattery which was necessary in his day as a means to business success, and was used by the greatest of his contemporaries. Yet the irony which the world's fopperies and struttings awaken in every man of keen insight and sense of humour is, as we have seen, by no means absent from him. The lesson of Lear was a fairly daring one for any man to read to the monarchs of that age. Shakespeare has respect for greatness only when the greatness is real and intrinsic. He can revere a high office without revering the man who holds it. It is into the mouth of a murderous and incestuous His English patriotism. II i 40 ff. usurper that, with poignant irony, he puts the familiar phrase about the divinity that doth hedge a king. He is an aristocrat, not in the conventional but in the etymological sense: a believer in the best, and in government by the best. His contempt for the "base mob," of which we are told so much, is a contempt for the baseness rather than for the mob. He can admire a great scoundrel- but for his greatness, and not for his villainy: as we see in the cases of Richard III, Iago and Macbeth. His nationalism is in part a just pride in the great achievements of his countrymen, in part also the spontaneous patriotism which comes by nature, and is independent of the actual deserts of one's motherland-though to be forfeited, like loyalty to a parent, by grave misdoings on the part of kings or governors. It is, further, a romantic and imaginative delight in the picturesque adventures of such a monarch as Henry V. That Shakespeare could discriminate in this matter, too, is shown by the admirable study of the patriot Faulconbridge in King John, and by the lines in King Richard II with which John of Gaunt describes This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself No man of British birth or blood can read unmoved that stirring paean. Yet, before it concludes, it becomes a lacerating indictment of the shame and dis |