My Shakespeare Progress

MY acquaintance with Mr. William Shakespeare began at a comparatively early age. In my father’s library there was a set of odd, ugly bookcases built against the wall, with paneled doors shutting each compartment in by itself,a privacy which, to my young imagination, was not without its charm. The books seemed thus to be divided into separate settlements, and one might knock at one particular door without bringing all the neighbors to peer from their windows.

In one of these settlements dwelt — and to this day continues to dwell — William Shakespeare, a Johnson and Steevens edition of him, in eight pasteboard-covered volumes; books light to the hand, of clear print, illustrated after a fashion which embodied all my early ideals of the necessities of the case, and which I still find endearing.

It was during a passage through the joys and sorrows of measles that my more familiar acquaintance with the Shakespeare family began. It is characteristic of a light-minded temperament to reckon most phases of life by their advantages rather than by their inconveniences; and if one must indulge in measles, one finds it well to realize that there are pleasures as well as pains to be wrested from this doubtful recreation: there was distinct joy in standing before the glass and watching one’s self break out with rosy blotches which before one’s eyes, became one blotch; there was joy in finding one’s self transformed from comparative insignificance to a position of importance in the family circle; there was joy above all other joys in seeing the library become a bedroom, and a massive bedstead with rolling head and footboards erected therein for one who had never before been chosen of the gods to occupy it in solitary grandeur.

There were evenings when the sister who wore her hair in puffs had engagements elsewhere, and the sister whose hair curled in her neck was studying silently in her corner; when the younger members of the family — after all, even from one’s vantage point as invalid, one was forced to envy them — were playing paper dolls on the dining-room table; and the quiet of the family circle was broken only by my father’s voice reading aloud some paragraph from his book or newspaper, or by my mother, who, never long silent, often announced, “I shall talk, whether anybody listens or not,” and then proceeded to put this promise into execution.

On such evenings I amused myself by holding a bed of justice modeled after a picture which I had often studied in an old French History: “ Bed of Justice held by Louis XV during the Regency.” The bed I occupied seemed to me quite as stately a piece of furniture as that represented in the picture, and I felt myself just as capable of presiding at such a function as Louis XV could have been at the age of five years. At this august ceremony I summoned the persons who resided in the bookcases to appear, marshaling them methodically from their different compartments. I had a speaking acquaintance with a good many volumes of whose contents I knew little.

Zimmermann On Solitude and Edwards On the Will stepped down from one particular top shelf, hand in hand with Young’s Night Thoughts and the works of John and Charles Wesley. From a dark corner, also high up in the world, came Eliza Wharton, the heroine of a melancholy tale which I was forbidden to read. Eliza went astray with a long f, and, notwithstanding I had stood at her bedside and seen her pass away in great agony, I had no slightest idea of the nature of her fault. Expurgated editions for the young are often a needless precaution. An innocent mind is its own best expurgator. There was, indeed, a gloom about Eliza which made her a far from agreeable companion, but I did not dream of adding to the mysterious woes she had already suffered by omitting her.

Mr. and Mrs. William Shakespeare and their six children belonged to a long row of gray books, bought in 1828. If one might judge by the recurring date written on the fly leaves of these volumes ,1828 was a year when the almanacs commanded “About this time begin to buy books.” It is very probable that my acquaintance with the Shakespeare family might have, for some time longer, remained a mere cursory intercourse, had it not been for one of those evenings when my bed of justice became a bed of education. On such nights, outside the radiant line of light which penetrated my darkness, a blazing fire illumined the faces gathered around it. In my outer blackness the sound of its crackling came to me like the sound of music. I pictured it to myself as the very embodiment of desire. To be grown up, to sit in the circle of dignitaries, always to be privileged to listen to the conversation of “comp’ny,” — that best comp’ny that really has something to say, that brings a message,—what could one ask more?

Now some one read aloud, —the latest speech in Congress, some new poem of Whittier, of Longfellow, Gail Hamilton’s last essay. Sometimes it was one voice that came to me, sometimes another; sometimes I fell asleep in the midst of the reading; but there was one deep tone that always held me spellbound when it took up the strain. It was like a many-keyed instrument, this ever-varying voice, that could be full or soft, trumpet-clear or gentle as the summer night. Often I sat upright at the very sound of it, as if it called me, as I knew it had called others,— and one night the Voice read Hamlet.

My great bed that evening was lapped about with velvet blackness, and through the lighted line of the door-crevice came the silken voice, outlining upon the inky shadows the portrait of a “black velvet prince,” for so Hamlet revealed himself to my childish mind. I was, indeed, only a child; I drank the story in, unformulating, uncriticising; yet it seems to me that even then it was not the wrecked and ruined Hamlet whose picture grew, vaguely enough, in my young thought, the Hamlet to whose poisoned spirit “this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, appeared no other thing than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors; ” — I saw rather the splendid young prince that might have been,

That “serpentining” voice that read and shaped and interpreted seemed to hold all things in its compass; and out of its windings the reverse of the dark picture shone like a golden intaglio graven on a background of jet: Hamlet of the noble mind, —

the loyal son, the lover, passionate, yet never “ passion’s slave,” the Hamlet who, even while he gave, withheld, so that the questioning years have never yet plucked the heart out of his mystery.

I do not say that I, a mere child, realized all this. Wrapped in my blanket, sitting up in my dark bed and filled with a sense of tragedy and loss, I yet felt as if my childish lips had been touched by a draught of that wine of the gods that never ceases fusing and transfusing in mortal veins so long as life lasts. Many a time since that night the vision of that darkened library has brought back the splendid, tragic young Hamlet whose picture grew amidst its shadows, and there is magic for me still in the very name of Elsinore.

The Tempest was my next Shakespeare acquisition, and I read it in the spring, when the narrow brook in our garden surged into a torrent, and called all day and all night like the voice of the sea. I cannot say that, outside the matter of personal liking or disliking, there was to me in those days any great or small in the choice of literature. Plato’s Dialogues, which I heard discussed in the family circle, Lucy’s Conversations in the Abbott series of children’s books, The Lamplighter, Ida May, the story of Dr. Kane’s Arctic expedition, which I was devouring in my leisure moments, — I lumped them all together, and cheerfully supplemented them with Shakespearean tales.

I could not think the plots of these stories natural, but I did find them charmingly unnatural. Their author possessed a magic talisman which made all things not only possible, but probable. Shakespeare could always bring

In real life one finds many delightful backgrounds for events that do not materialize, but Shakespeare’s scenes were never unpopulated; his characters met him halfway.

Here, for instance, was a beautiful isle of the sea, inhabited only by a banished Duke of magical powers, —Shakespeare always had a banished duke “up his sleeve, ” — the duke’s lovely daughter, “made up of every creature’s best,” and a man-monster, unique even in Shakespeare creations. In an everyday sort of world the fair maiden might very probably have blushed unseen and wasted her sweetness on the island air,—in everyday life, but never as the heroine of one of the Bard of Avon’s competent creations. It was the most inevitable thing in the order of things that a handy shipwreck should bring to these very shores all the persons whom the deposed duke would naturally care to meet, and that among them, preluded by the wild waves singing “Hail, the conquering hero comes! ” should appear not merely the most beautiful prince that ever was seen, but the prince, the one and only gentleman born and predestined to set wrongs right; and in the midst of Prospero’s hocus-pocusing, and Ariel’s gentle spiriting, and the love-making of Ferdinand and Miranda, full of sweet and buoyant youth, all the characters gradually got into line, the deposed duke came to his own again, and even poor, monstrous Caliban saw a future of promise. What more in the way of a story could a child desire ?

In the Shakespeare land of probable improbabilities all things worked together for good. If any fair-faced but restless maiden chose to go masquerading around the world in man’s attire, no ill-judging interference was to be expected on the part of parents or guardians, nor did inconvenient suspicions as to the real sex of the disguised one awake in the minds of the spectators to spoil the climax. Viola, bearing Orsino’s messages to Olivia, does not hesitate to sport with the occasion. “ By the very fangs of malice,” she asseverates, “I swear I am not what I play;” yet no prodigality of hints would prevent the unquestioning Olivia from bestowing her affections upon the pretty youth. Julia, in page’s dress, follows her lover in his travels, is daily in his presence, acts as his go-between in his courtship of Silvia, well knowing that Proteus would never be mean enough to recognize her until the appointed hour had struck. Portia, after settling her love affairs by the ingenious and fascinating device of the three caskets, slips on the robe of a doctor of laws and hurries off to Venice to save Antonio’s life, entering immediately into court practice without protest or suspicion on the part of either plaintiff or defendant.

In fact, in all Shakespeare’s “story plays,” as I used to denominate them in those days of their first reading, the most delightful conditions existed. The pastimes of childhood which charmed one most were those which began with the magic words, “Let’s Pretend,” and Shakespeare was surely the prince of pretenders. One read his pages with delightful certainty that at the crucial moment things would balance up. Puck might be relied upon to happen around in season for the anointing of the eyes of the unseeing; all the resolved and stiff-necked bachelors would be cozened into happy wedlock; the reprehensible Leontes would find that Hermione had been kept for him on ice, in order that she might appear in the freshness of youth as a due reward for repentance.

The tragedies of Shakespeare, which I essayed next, did not especially appeal to my immature taste. Othello was, after all, only a blackamoor with a talent for smothering; the story of Lear wrung my heart; and the knocking on the gate in Macbeth made me tremble in my bed when I woke “ in the dead waste and middle of the night.” Julius Cæsar I found thrilling but sanguinary, so I turned to what I called “the Kings,” and there found solid ground. These monarchs I associated in my mind with those depicted in Kings First and Second of scriptural origin, though I much preferred Shakespeare’s sovereigns, on the whole, as less joined in recollection to sobriety and family prayers.

Now, for the first time, separate scenes and utterances began to write themselves into my memory, though perchance, even yet, I did not sufficiently discriminate between Falstaff enjoying “a last year’s pippin, with a dish of Carraways” in Shallow’s orchard, and Somerset and Warwick plucking the red rose and the white in the Temple garden.

John of Gaunt, “a prophet new-inspired,” apostrophizing from his couch This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

spoke to unforgetting ears. Henry the Fifth’s broken French wooing; Buckingham on the scaffold calling on

Queen Katharine’s swan song,—

these, and others chosen by one knows not what process of random selection, shaped themselves for me into the eternal ramework of things. But it was in the first part of Henry IV that I most delighted. Romeo was but a lover, Hamlet a prince of tragedy; but Harry Monmouth and Harry Percy revealed themselves as the very apotheosis of hot-hearted gallant youth.

and Hotspur Harry Percy assuring his Kate, —

these were creatures of deeds, not words alone. “ What can a poet do better,”asks Theodore Roosevelt, “than sound the praises of a good fighter and a good lover ? ”

Now, too, there were incredible beginnings of war in our own land to make Shrewsbury, Agincourt, and the rest seem like nearer and more probable tales. On the “ State grounds” at Augusta tents were clustering into white villages; school days were interrupted by the tramping feet of marching infantry or the resounding hoofs of long cavalry battalions, breaking into quiet recitation hours and scattering the old echoes of Homeric legends and Cæsar’s wars.

These were the same gay young fellows that Shakespeare wrote about, —

They filled the hours with new and unwonted emotions,emotions with which, in those early days, forebodings of death and disaster had little part. For myself, fortunately or unfortunately, — since this was the heroic chance of a lifetime, — none of my nearest and dearest steamed through the town in those long railway trains filled with blue-coated warriors, trains which I persistently ran away from school to gaze upon; so, held back by no personal feeling, I mixed the old wars with the new, and Walter Blunt dying for his king, Harry Monmouth lamenting over Hotspur slain, —

wove themselves into my thought with the story of Ellsworth giving his life for the flag and Theodore Winthrop perishing in the zenith of manly promise.

After I had grown to womanhood I gained a new association to join with my old childish memories of Harry Monmouth and Harry Percy. Among the numerous wanderers on the face of the earth who have at various times come to my doors, there chanced along one summer evening a dark-faced Southern boy fleeing from an uncongenial home and from the consequences of a student brawl. A crude and ill-balanced creature one found him, full of undeveloped possibilities, yet wholly unreasoning, and worse than untrained. He was willing to work at the most menial occupation, to tear his unused hands with pick and shovel, if need be, that he might be indebted to no one for the poor living he gained; but by reason of his hot temper, hot prejudices, and hot impulses, he continually ran counter to those who sacrificed most to help his need. For some weeks I served as a sort of mother confessor to this untamed wanderer, the only person to whom he condescended to pour out all his woes. He came to me alike for the healing of his spirit and his undergarments, to tell the tale of the waning of his patience and his stock of cigarettes. Most of all he came for books, for this poor waif was an omnivorous reader. The only fragment of a library which he himself possessed was a ragged copy of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, and Hotspur Percy was his cherished hero.

One bright evening I was summoned from a table full of guests to meet my protégé, and we sat down on a garden seat in the green angle of turf by the backdoor,— for his lofty spirit forbade front entrances to one engaged in menial toil,—while he brought his history up to date. On the preceding day it seemed that work and money had both failed, and since he would not cheat the poor woman with whom he lodged — though she would gladly have trusted him — out of any portion of her scanty emolument, he had betaken himself to the fields, and there spent the night upon the lap of earth. He told me of the spot he had chosen, an open meadow lying level under the stars, with hills rising all about it. And, waking in the coolness of the early morning to find himself shivering on his dewy bed, he had chosen to forget his discomforts by fighting the battle of Shrewsbury over again, with new results, for this time it was Harry Percy who triumphed.

“It warmed me up so that I forgot everything else,” said this forlorn one, “just to think of licking old Bolingbroke.”

I know the spot where this famous battle was refought, and I have never passed it since that day without a vision of a lonely wayfarer, a poor youth not without his own chivalries, sitting huddled in that green hollow of the world to watch Harry Monmouth and Harry Percy ride over the hills of dawn.

It was as a seminary student that I was introduced to Shakespeare’s sonnets, though, indeed, no such treasure-trove was included in the published curriculum. In that halcyon time the joy which created the evening and the morning into a new day found its keynote in the billet which one’s table-opposite handed one each morning at the foot of the dining-room stairs; and the buoyant young man who lent me his company at mealtimes was a person of many resources. He loved poetry only less than he loved mischief, and he found in it not only a possession to joy in and assimilate, but also a polished weapon for use. In that pretty game of compliment which we played with one another, he never spoiled the idyl by holding back anything that seemed necessary to render the illusion artistically perfect; and there was a period when fragments of Shakespeare’s sonnets alternated with Mrs. Browning’s in giving these morning missives point.

“I only give you the tag ends of the Shakespeare sonnets, and ought not to use those,” wrote this precocious commentator, “because Mrs. Browning’s are so much more respectable ; but when you read the Shakespeare love story — four or five years from now; don’t do it sooner — you’ll tumble into the abyss of its fascination just as I have. And may I be there to see!”

When, in later years, I did fall under the charm of the sonnets, I think their fascination was intensified because the dark thread of Shakespeare’s love and mystery — the strength in weakness and weakness in strength — was brightened by another inwoven thread, — the tender memory of one, no longer a “fool of time,” whose grave was already green.

But that infinitely sad and human world of the sonnets never marred the splendid sanity of the world of I he dramas. There is an ever-recurring tendency in human nature which is aptly illustrated in the reply given the other day by a young acquaintance of my own who had been overtaken in a fault.

“No,” he asserted stoutly, when questioned concerning his personal responsibility in the matter, “I don’t blame it on myself. I blame it onto God! ”

Shakespeare saw life in large, and wrote as he saw. He never “blamed it onto God.” His pages are full of the inexorable sequence of cause and effect, and the swift march of deeds points the moral of individual responsibility. If things were “rotten in Denmark,” it was because the fathers had eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth were set on edge; if Macbeth trembled at the knocking at the gate, it was because conscience doth make cowards of us all; if Wolsey, that had

fell from his high estate, it was because he had forgotten to be just, and fear not. The ghosts that haunted Bosworth Field were of Richard’s own creating; and Regan and Goneril, desperately dead, reap but their inevitable due, when

In short, Shakespeare’s message is the message of a robust manhood and womanhood: Brace up, pay for what you have, do good if you wish to get good; good or bad, shoulder the burden of your moral responsibility, and never forget that cowardice is the most fatal and most futile crime in the calendar of crimes.