accents of a Hebrew prophet:-'O London, thou art great in glory, and envied for thy greatness; thy Towers, thy Temples, and thy Pinnacles stand upon thy head like borders of fine gold, thy waters like frindges of silver hang at the hemmes of thy garments. Thou art the goodliest of thy neighbours, but the prowdest, the welthiest, but the most wanton. Thou hast all things in thee to make thee fairest, and all things in thee to make thee foulest; for thou art attir'd like a Bride, drawing all that looke upon thee, to be in love with thee, but there is much harlot in thine eyes'. . . so sickness was sent to breathe her unwholesome ayres into thy nosthrills, so that thou, that wert before the only Gallant and Minion of the world, hadst in a short time more diseases (than a common harlot hath) hanging upon thee; thou suddenly becamst the by-talke of neighbors, the scorne and contempt of Nations.' Thus Dekker in 1606; and, in the next year, Marston, who equalled him in blatant spirits and far excelled him in ruffianism, left writing for the Stage, and entered the Church!

These are aspects of Shakespeare's environment which we cannot neglect in deciding how much or how little of his lyrical art he owed to anything but his own genius and devotion to Beauty. Least of all may we first assume that his art reflects his environment, and then, inverting this imaginary relation, declare it for the product of a golden age which never existed. Yet, thanks to modern idolatry of naked generalisations, it is the fashion to throw Shakespeare in with other fruits of the Renaissance, acknowledging the singularity of his genius, but still labelling it for an organic part of a wide development. And in this development we have been taught to see nothing but a renewal of life and strength, of truth and sanity, following on the senile mystifications of an effete Middle Age. The theory makes for a sharp definition of contrast; but it is hard to find its 1 The Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606).

justification either in the facts of history or in the opinions of Shakespeare's contemporaries, who believed that, on the contrary, they lived in an epoch of decadence. In any age of rapid development there is much, no doubt, that may fitly be illustrated by metaphors drawn from sunrise and spring; but there are also aspects akin to sunset and autumn. The truth seems to be that at such times the processes of both birth and death are abnormally quickened. To every eye life becomes more coloured and eventful daily; but it shines and changes with curiously mingled effects: speaking to these of youth and the hill-tops, and to those of declension and decay.

In 1611 Shakespeare withdrew to Stratford-on-Avon.1 Of his life in London we know little at first hand. But we know enough of what he did; enough of what he was said to have done; enough of the dispositions and the lives of his contemporaries; to imagine very clearly the world in which he worked for some twenty-three years. He lived the life of a successful artist, rocked on the waves and sunk in the troughs of exhilaration and fatigue. He was befriended for personal and political reasons by brilliant young noblemen, and certainly grieved over their misfortunes. He was intimate with Southampton and William Herbert, and must surely have known Herbert's mistress, Mary Fitton. He suffered, first, rather more than less from the jealousy and detraction of the scholar-wits, the older University pens, and then, rather less than more, from the histrionic rivalry of his brother playwrights. He was himself a mark for scandal,2 and he

1 Baynes argues that he left London in 1608. He ceased writing for the stage in 1611, and disposed of his interest in the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres probably in that year.

2 Sir W. Davenant boasted that he was Shakespeare's son :-- When he was pleasant over a glass of wine with his most intimate friends' (Aubrey's Lives of Eminent Persons. Completed before 1680). Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps' Outlines, ii. 43. And there is that story of the trick the poet played on Burbage : which might hail from the Decameron. See John Manningham's Diary, 13th March 1601-2.

watched the thunder clouds of Politics and Puritanism gathering over the literature and the drama which he loved.1 Yet far away from the dust and din of these turmoils he bore the sorrows, and prosecuted the success of his other life at Stratford. His only son, Hamnet, died in 1596. His daughter, Susannah, married, and his mother, Mary Arden, died in 1608, and in the same year he bestowed his name on the child of an old friend, Henry Walker. Through all these years, by lending money and purchasing land, he built up a fortune magnified by legend long after his death. And in the April of 1616 he died himself, as some have it, on his birthday. He was bury'd on the north side of the chancel, in the great Church at Stratford, where a monument is plac'd on the wall. On his grave-stone underneath is :

This slight and most imperfect sketch, founded mainly on impressions brought away from the study of many noble portraits, is still sufficient to prove how little the Poems owe, even remotely, to the vicissitudes of an artist's career. Of the wild woodland life in Arden Forest, of boyish memories and of books read at school, there is truly something to be traced in echoes from Ovid and in frequent illustrations drawn from sport and nature. But of the later life in London there is little

1 Warton, Hist. of Eng. Poetry (1824), iv. 320. In 1599. Marston's Pygmalion, Marlowe's Ovid, the Satires of Hall and Marston, the epigrams of Davies and the Caltha poetarum, etc., were burnt by order of the prelates, Whitgift and Bancroft. The books of Nash and Harvey were ordered to be confiscated, and it was laid down that no plays should be printed without permission from the Archbishop of Canterbury, nor any “English Historyes" (novels?) without the sanction of the Privy Council.'

2 Rowe, 1709.

enough, even in the Sonnets that tell of rival poets and a dark lady, and nothing that points so clearly to any single experience as to admit of definite application. For in Shakespeare's Poems, as in every great work of art, single experiences have been generalised or, rather, merged in the passion which they rouse to a height and a pitch of sensitiveness immeasurable in contrast with its puny origins. The volume and the intensity of an artist's passion have led many to believe that great artists speak for all mankind of joy and sorrow. But to great artists the bliss and martyrdom of man are of less import, so it seems, than to others. The griefs and tragedies that bulk so largely in the lives of the inapt and the inarticulate are-so far as we may divine the secrets of an alien race-but a small part of the great artist's experience: hardly more, perhaps, than stimulants to his general sense of the whole world's infinite appeal to sensation and consciousness.

XI

Shakespeare's Poems are detached by the perfection of his art from both the personal experience which supplied their matter and the artistic environment which suggested their rough-hewn form. Were they newly discovered, you could tell, of course, that they were written in England, and about the end of the Sixteenth Century: just as you can tell a Flemish from an Italian, a Fourteenth from a Sixteenth Century picture; and every unprejudiced critic has said of the Sonnets that they express Shakespeare's own feelings in his own person.'1 That is true. But it is equally true, and it is vastly

1 Mr. Dowden :-'With Wordsworth, Sir Henry Taylor, and Mr. Swinburne; with François-Victor Hugo, with Kreyssig, Ulrici, Gervinus, and Hermann Isaac ; with Boaden, Armitage Brown, and Hallam; with Furnivall, Spalding, Rossetti, and Palgrave, I believe that Shakespeare's Sonnets express his own feelings in his own person.' So do Mr. A. E. Harrison and Mr. Tyler.

more important, that the Sonnets are not an Autobiography. In this Sonnet or that you feel the throb of great passions shaking behind the perfect verse; here and there you listen to a sigh as of a world awaking to its weariness. Yet the movement and sound are elemental: they steal on your senses like a whisper trembling through summer-leaves, and in their vastness are removed by far from the suffocation of any one man's tragedy. The writer of the Sonnets has felt more, and thought more, than the writer of the Venus and the Lucrece; but he remains a poet-not a Rousseau, not a Metaphysician-and his chief concern is still to worship Beauty in the imagery and music of his verse. It is, indeed, strange to find how much of thought, imagery, and rhythm is common to Venus and Adonis and the Sonnets, for the two works could hardly belong by their themes to classes of poetry more widely distinct-(the first is a late Renaissance imitation of late Classical Mythology; the second a sequence of intimate occasional verses)—nor could they differ more obviously from other poems in the same classes. Many such imitations and sequences of sonnets were written by Shakespeare's contemporaries, but among them all there is not one poem that in the least resembles Venus and Adonis, and there are but few sonnets that remind you, even faintly, of Shakespeare's. And just such distinctions isolate The Rape of Lucrece. By its theme, as a romantic story in rhyme, it has nothing in common with its two companions from Shakespeare's hand; but it is lonelier than they, having indeed no fellow in Elizabethan poetry and not many in English literature. Leaving ballads on one side, you may count the romantic stories in English rhyme, that can by courtesy be called literature, upon the fingers of one hand. There are but two arches in the bridge by which Keats and Chaucer communicate across the centuries, and Shakespeare's Lucrece stands for the solitary pier. Yet, distinct as they are from each other in character, these three things by