it black. The right hand holds a pen, the left rests on a sheet of paper placed upon a cushion. Underneath the cushion is the following inscription :— IVDICIO PYLIUM, GENIO SOCRATEM, ARTE MARONEM, STAY PASSENGER, WHY GOEST THOV BY SO FAST? OBIIT ANNO DOI 1616. In 1793, on the advice of Edmond Malone, the bust was painted white; and so it remained until 1861, when it was recoloured as at the first. Beside the Stratford bust there is only one unquestionable portrait of the great poet-that upon the title-page of the First Folio (1623). It was engraved by Martin Droeshout, and verses by Ben Jonson commend it as a trustworthy likeness. It is ill executed, yet it seems to me a more pleasing portrait than the bust, while there is enough in common between the two to assure us that in each there is at least something of the substance of truth. The authenticity of the celebrated Kesselstadt death-mask is very doubtful, but we could wish to believe that this noble and refined face was indeed that of Shakespeare. The Chandos, the Felton, the Jansen, and the Stratford portraits are all of questionable pedigree; many other alleged likenesses can be proved to be forgeries. We must be content to accept certain broad facts from the bust and the Droeshout print, and supply from our imagination SHAKESPEARE'S MIND. 43 the spirit and the life which these unfortunately lack. And if this should leave us at the last unsatisfied we may be well content to follow the counsel of Ben Jonson: Reader, looke Not on his Picture, but his Booke. II. §22. Studying Shakespeare's Book of Might, as Jonson exhorts us to do, we assuredly make acquaintance with the man in the best possible way; we are constantly in contact with his mind; he neighbours us on every side, rouses our intellect, moves our passions, confirms our will, moulds our character, touches our spirit to finer issues, envelops us with the atmosphere of his wisdom, courage, mirth, benignity. We breathe his influence. And yet so effectually does he hide himself behind his creation, that even while we live and move in his power and presence, it seems as if we knew him not and could never know him aright. Let us take heart; he who knows the offspring of Shakespeare's genius knows the man, and indeed is far more intimate with Shakespeare's mind than if he were to meet the great poet now and again in the tiringroom of the Globe, or the inner chamber of the Mermaid Tavern, or even in the quietude of his Stratford fields and lanes. Shakespeare was fortunate in the moment of his advent to the stage. The English people had successfully passed through a period of probation, and now stood "upon the top of happy hours". The classical culture of the Renaissance and its pas- The moment was especially a fortunate one for a dramatic writer. The development of every art during its earlier stages is gradual and slow; the bud insensibly swells and matures, then suddenly some genial morning the calyx bursts, the bud becomes a blossom, and all its colour and fragrance are open to the day. So it was with the dramatic art in the later Elizabethan years. Its history from the earliest miracle-plays had been one of some centuries. The drama was not the creation of a few eminent individuals, but rather a product of the national mind distinguished by the features of the national character. In the Collective Mystery, r DEVELOPMENT OF THE DRAMA. 45 which surveyed the history of the human race from the origin of man to the judgment-day, it had gained an epic breadth. In the Moralities it had acquired an ethical depth, a seriousness of moral purpose, and this didactic tendency had in a measure been saved from the aridity and abstractedness of mere allegory by the close connection of the Morality with historical passions, persons, and events. In both the Miracles and the Moralities scope had been found for the play of humour, sometimes deliberately sought as a relief from the poetry of edification, sometimes naively mingling with passages of grace, tenderness, or pathos, and enhancing the effect of these. Under the influence of a growing sense of art, aided by classical models, and Italian plays and tales of passion and of wit, the elder forms of the English drama passed away or were transmuted into regular tragedy, comedy, and history. The mirth was still often rude, but it began to be organized around some dramatic centre, and to find its sources not merely in ridiculous incidents, but in what is mirth-provoking in human character. The terror and pity were often coarsely stimulated by scenes of outrage and inexhaustible effusion of blood; but amid these scenes of horror figures which had in them at least great tragic possibilities sometimes appeared. Perhaps the most truly English of the several dramatic forms was the Chronicle History, allied at once with tragedy and comedy, but in some degree saved from the extravagances of each by the substantial matter of historical fact with which it dealt. When great deeds were actually accomplished by Englishmen they had a ready credence of the imagination for the heroic achievements of their ancestors as set forth in these Histories. They had even some of the elements of a true historic sense. $23. Shakespeare's immediate predecessors in the drama were scholar-poets, who yet, with one exception that of John Lyly-may be said to have used popular methods, and to have made their appeal not to scholarly or courtly spectators, but to the public. As poets of the Renaissance they delighted in classical allusion and classical imagery, but these served chiefly as a colour and varnish of their art; in conception it was essentially romantic and English of the Elizabethan days. The tragedies of Marlowe in their plots are pure melodrama, but the melodrama is glorified by the genius of a poet who was a lofty idealist in art, and whose imagination hungered and thirsted after beauty. In each of his earlier plays a great protagonist stands forth who is the incarnation of some supreme passion; Tamburlaine, embodying the mere lust of sway in its crudest form; Barrabas, the passion of avarice with attendant power; Faustus, the desire of boundless knowledge with the empire that knowledge brings. In Edward II. the dramatist gave the model of a noble historical play, from which Shakespeare perhaps made studies in writing scenes of his own Richard II. Comedy owed nearly as much to Greene and Peele as tragedy owed to Marlowe. They first lifted comedy out of its mean surroundings and made it poetical. Not that they despised buffooneries and horseplay as modes of raising a laugh, but they did not rest content with these. T |