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Updated: May 20, 2025
He had not much to say for once in his life," here Master Shakspere smiled pityingly, "but he sent his love forever to his only daughter Cicely." Cicely was sitting up, listening with wide eyes, and eagerly nodded her head as if to say, "Of course." "He also begged of Nicholas Attwood that he would forgive him whatever wrong he had done him."
What would we not give to be able to relate a half-dozen good anecdotes about Shakspere? It is true there are traditions, the best known of which is the story that he poached deer in the park of Sir Thomas Lucy. Men have discussed the pros and cons of this deer-stealing tradition with a gravity and fulness worthy of a weightier cause.
Long before Shakspere, perhaps with fardel on his back, travelled to London, the stage, not only in the capital, but in the whole country, had begun to exercise its attractive power upon the people's imagination.
In A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas's, Stevenson confessed that there were four plays of Shakspere he had never been able to read through, though for a different reason: they were Richard III, Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, and All's Well that Ends Well. The Egoist is one of the best-known novels of Mr. George Meredith, born 1828.
Men had learned the horrors of the time from their fathers; they had drunk in with their childhood the lesson that such a chaos of weakness and misrule must never be risked again. From such a risk the Crown seemed the one security. With Shakspere as with his fellow-countrymen the Crown is still the centre and safeguard of the national life.
But the probability, notwithstanding, must surely be allowed as well, that, in great artists, the amount of conscious art will bear some proportion to the amount of unconscious truth: the visible volcanic light will bear a true relation to the hidden fire of the globe; so that it will not seem likely that, in such a writer as Shakspere, we should find many indications of present and operative art, of which he was himself unaware.
If he imitated the foreign stage he could not be blind to the fact that the Elizabethan playwrights possessed "a more masculine fancy and a greater spirit in the writing than there is in any of the French." He followed Corneille but he was haunted by memories of "the divine Shakspere." His failure indeed sprang from the very truth of his poetic ideal.
Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere, that he "could not have written an epic: he would have died of a plethora of thought." Shakspere's two narrative poems, indeed, are by no means models of their kind. The current of the story is choked at every turn, though it be with golden sand.
The interest of human character was still fresh and vivid; the sense of individuality drew a charm from its novelty; and poet and essayist were busy alike in sketching the "humours" of mankind. Shakspere sketched with his fellows.
The actor he addresses belongs to one of them. Tucca mentions two theatres by name 'your Globes, and your Triumphs. He says to the actor: 'Commend me to seven shares and a half. Shakespere and his colleagues had certain fixed shares in the 'Globe; and the words of the actor, as regards the poor winter they had, confirm that which Shakspere gives to understand in Hamlet, that 'there was, for a while, no money bid for argument, unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question.
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