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\hyphenation{Shake-spear}

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\frontmatter




\title{Dark Lady of the Sonnets}


\author{George Bernard Shaw}

\maketitle
\vspace*{\stretch{1}}

\noindent This public-domain (U.S.) text was scanned \& proofed by
Ron Burkey \& Amy Thomte. Shavian spelling peculiarities\mbox{---}such
as omitting apostrophes in contractions (e.g., {}``dont'' for {}``don't'')
and the periods in abbreviations (e.g., {}``Mrs'' for {}``Mrs.'')
have been retained as-is. The Project Gutenberg edition (designated
{}``dlots10'') was subsequently converted to \LaTeX{} using \textbf{GutenMark}
software. Report problems to info@sandroid.org. Revision B1 differs
from B in that {}``----'' has everywhere been replaced with {}``---''.

\noindent \begin{center}Revision: B1\\
Date: 02/02/2008\end{center}

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\noindent \textit{\emph{The Dark Lady of The Sonnets}} \textit{was
first performed at the Haymarket Theatre, on the afternoon of Thursday,
the 24th November 1910, by Mona Limerick as the Dark Lady, Suzanne
Sheldon as Queen Elizabeth, Granville Barker as Shakespear, and Hugh
Tabberer as the Warder.}

\vspace{\stretch{1}}

\mainmatter



\chapter*{\raggedright PREFACE TO THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{PREFACE TO THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS}

\markboth{George Bernard Shaw}{Dark Lady of the Sonnets}


\section*{\raggedright How the Play came to be Written}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{How the Play came to be Written}

\markboth{George Bernard Shaw}{Dark Lady of the Sonnets}

I had better explain why, in this little \textit{piece d'occasion},
written for a performance in aid of the funds of the project for establishing
a National Theatre as a memorial to Shakespear, I have identified
the Dark Lady with Mistress Mary Fitton. First, let me say that I
do not contend that the Dark Lady was Mary Fitton, because when the
case in Mary's favor (or against her, if you please to consider that
the Dark Lady was no better than she ought to have been) was complete,
a portrait of Mary came to light and turned out to be that of a fair
lady, not of a dark one. That settles the question, if the portrait
is authentic, which I see no reason to doubt, and the lady's hair
undyed, which is perhaps less certain. Shakespear rubbed in the lady's
complexion in his sonnets mercilessly; for in his day black hair was
as unpopular as red hair was in the early days of Queen Victoria.
Any tinge lighter than raven black must be held fatal to the strongest
claim to be the Dark Lady. And so, unless it can be shewn that Shakespear's
sonnets exasperated Mary Fitton into dyeing her hair and getting painted
in false colors, I must give up all pretence that my play is historical.
The later suggestion of Mr Acheson that the Dark Lady, far from being
a maid of honor, kept a tavern in Oxford and was the mother of Davenant
the poet, is the one I should have adopted had I wished to be up to
date. Why, then, did I introduce the Dark Lady as Mistress Fitton?

Well, I had two reasons. The play was not to have been written by
me at all, but by Mrs Alfred Lyttelton; and it was she who suggested
a scene of jealousy between Queen Elizabeth and the Dark Lady at the
expense of the unfortunate Bard. Now this, if the Dark Lady was a
maid of honor, was quite easy. If she were a tavern landlady, it would
have strained all probability. So I stuck to Mary Fitton. But I had
another and more personal reason. I was, in a manner, present at the
birth of the Fitton theory. Its parent and I had become acquainted;
and he used to consult me on obscure passages in the sonnets, on which,
as far as I can remember, I never succeeded in throwing the faintest
light, at a time when nobody else thought my opinion, on that or any
other subject, of the slightest importance. I thought it would be
friendly to immortalize him, as the silly literary saying is, much
as Shakespear immortalized Mr W.\ H., as he said he would, simply
by writing about him.

Let me tell the story formally.


\section*{\raggedright Thomas Tyler}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{Thomas Tyler}

\markboth{George Bernard Shaw}{Dark Lady of the Sonnets}

Throughout the eighties at least, and probably for some years before,
the British Museum reading room was used daily by a gentleman of such
astonishing and crushing ugliness that no one who had once seen him
could ever thereafter forget him. He was of fair complexion, rather
golden red than sandy; aged between forty-five and sixty; and dressed
in frock coat and tall hat of presentable but never new appearance.
His figure was rectangular, waistless, neckless, ankleless, of middle
height, looking shortish because, though he was not particularly stout,
there was nothing slender about him. His ugliness was not unamiable;
it was accidental, external, excrescential. Attached to his face from
the left ear to the point of his chin was a monstrous goitre, which
hung down to his collar bone, and was very inadequately balanced by
a smaller one on his right eyelid. Nature's malice was so overdone
in his case that it somehow failed to produce the effect of repulsion
it seemed to have aimed at. When you first met Thomas Tyler you could
think of nothing else but whether surgery could really do nothing
for him. But after a very brief acquaintance you never thought of
his disfigurements at all, and talked to him as you might to Romeo
or Lovelace; only, so many people, especially women, would not risk
the preliminary ordeal, that he remained a man apart and a bachelor
all his days. I am not to be frightened or prejudiced by a tumor;
and I struck up a cordial acquaintance with him, in the course of
which he kept me pretty closely on the track of his work at the Museum,
in which I was then, like himself, a daily reader.

He was by profession a man of letters of an uncommercial kind. He
was a specialist in pessimism; had made a translation of Ecclesiastes
of which eight copies a year were sold; and followed up the pessimism
of Shakespear and Swift with keen interest. He delighted in a hideous
conception which he called the theory of the cycles, according to
which the history of mankind and the universe keeps eternally repeating
itself without the slightest variation throughout all eternity; so
that he had lived and died and had his goitre before and would live
and die and have it again and again and again. He liked to believe
that nothing that happened to him was completely novel: he was persuaded
that he often had some recollection of its previous occurrence in
the last cycle. He hunted out allusions to this favorite theory in
his three favorite pessimists. He tried his hand occasionally at deciphering
ancient inscriptions, reading them as people seem to read the stars,
by discovering bears and bulls and swords and goats where, as it seems
to me, no sane human being can see anything but stars higgledy-piggledy.
Next to the translation of Ecclesiastes, his \textit{magnum opus}
was his work on Shakespear's Sonnets, in which he accepted a previous
identification of Mr W.\ H., the {}``onlie begetter'' of the sonnets,
with the Earl of Pembroke (William Herbert), and promulgated his own
identification of Mistress Mary Fitton with the Dark Lady. Whether
he was right or wrong about the Dark Lady did not matter urgently
to me: she might have been Maria Tompkins for all I cared. But Tyler
would have it that she was Mary Fitton; and he tracked Mary down from
the first of her marriages in her teens to her tomb in Cheshire, whither
he made a pilgrimage and whence returned in triumph with a picture
of her statue, and the news that he was convinced she was a dark lady
by traces of paint still discernible.

In due course he published his edition of the Sonnets, with the evidence
he had collected. He lent me a copy of the book, which I never returned.
But I reviewed it in the \emph{Pall Mall Gazette} on the 7th of January
1886, and thereby let loose the Fitton theory in a wider circle of
readers than the book could reach. Then Tyler died, sinking unnoted
like a stone in the sea. I observed that Mr Acheson, Mrs Davenant's
champion, calls him Reverend. It may very well be that he got his
knowledge of Hebrew in reading for the Church; and there was always
something of the clergyman or the schoolmaster in his dress and air.
Possibly he may actually have been ordained. But he never told me
that or anything else about his affairs; and his black pessimism would
have shot him violently out of any church at present established in
the West. We never talked about affairs: we talked about Shakespear,
and the Dark Lady, and Swift, and Koheleth, and the cycles, and the
mysterious moments when a feeling came over us that this had happened
to us before, and about the forgeries of the Pentateuch which were
offered for sale to the British Museum, and about literature and things
of the spirit generally. He always came to my desk at the Museum and
spoke to me about something or other, no doubt finding that people
who were keen on this sort of conversation were rather scarce. He
remains a vivid spot of memory in the void of my forgetfulness, a
quite considerable and dignified soul in a grotesquely disfigured
body.


\section*{\raggedright Frank Harris}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{Frank Harris}

\markboth{George Bernard Shaw}{Dark Lady of the Sonnets}

To the review in the \emph{Pall Mall Gazette} I attribute, rightly
or wrongly, the introduction of Mary Fitton to Mr Frank Harris. My
reason for this is that Mr Harris wrote a play about Shakespear and
Mary Fitton; and when I, as a pious duty to Tyler's ghost, reminded
the world that it was to Tyler we owed the Fitton theory, Frank Harris,
who clearly had not a notion of what had first put Mary into his head,
believed, I think, that I had invented Tyler expressly for his discomfiture;
for the stress I laid on Tyler's claims must have seemed unaccountable
and perhaps malicious on the assumption that he was to me a mere name
among the thousands of names in the British Museum catalogue. Therefore
I make it clear that I had and have personal reasons for remembering
Tyler, and for regarding myself as in some sort charged with the duty
of reminding the world of his work. I am sorry for his sake that Mary's
portrait is fair, and that Mr W.\ H. has veered round again from
Pembroke to Southampton; but even so his work was not wasted: it is
by exhausting all the hypotheses that we reach the verifiable one;
and after all, the wrong road always leads somewhere.

Frank Harris's play was written long before mine. I read it in manuscript
before the Shakespear Memorial National Theatre was mooted; and if
there is anything except the Fitton theory (which is Tyler's property)
in my play which is also in Mr Harris's it was I who annexed it from
him and not he from me. It does not matter anyhow, because this play
of mine is a brief trifle, and full of manifest impossibilities at
that; whilst Mr Harris's play is serious both in size, intention,
and quality. But there could not in the nature of things be much resemblance,
because Frank conceives Shakespear to have been a broken-hearted,
melancholy, enormously sentimental person, whereas I am convinced
that he was very like myself: in fact, if I had been born in 1556
instead of in 1856, I should have taken to blank verse and given Shakespear
a harder run for his money than all the other Elizabethans put together.
Yet the success of Frank Harris's book on Shakespear gave me great
delight.

To those who know the literary world of London there was a sharp stroke
of ironic comedy in the irresistible verdict in its favor. In critical
literature there is one prize that is always open to competition,
one blue ribbon that always carries the highest critical rank with
it. To win, you must write the best book of your generation on Shakespear.
It is felt on all sides that to do this a certain fastidious refinement,
a delicacy of taste, a correctness of manner and tone, and high academic
distinction in addition to the indispensable scholarship and literary
reputation, are needed; and men who pretend to these qualifications
are constantly looked to with a gentle expectation that presently
they will achieve the great feat. Now if there is a man on earth who
is the utter contrary of everything that this description implies;
whose very existence is an insult to the ideal it realizes; whose
eye disparages, whose resonant voice denounces, whose cold shoulder
jostles every decency, every delicacy, every amenity, every dignity,
every sweet usage of that quiet life of mutual admiration in which
perfect Shakespearian appreciation is expected to arise, that man
is Frank Harris. Here is one who is extraordinarily qualified, by
a range of sympathy and understanding that extends from the ribaldry
of a buccaneer to the shyest tendernesses of the most sensitive poetry,
to be all things to all men, yet whose proud humor it is to be to
every man, provided the man is eminent and pretentious, the champion
of his enemies. To the Archbishop he is an atheist, to the atheist
a Catholic mystic, to the Bismarckian Imperialist an Anacharsis Klootz,
to Anacharsis Klootz a Washington, to Mrs Proudie a Don Juan, to Aspasia
a John Knox: in short, to everyone his complement rather than his
counterpart, his antagonist rather than his fellow-creature. Always
provided, however, that the persons thus confronted are respectable
persons. Sophie Perovskaia, who perished on the scaffold for blowing
Alexander II to fragments, may perhaps have echoed Hamlet's\begin{flushleft} \begin{verse} \footnotesize \ \\

\mbox{Oh God, Horatio, what a wounded name---}\\*

\mbox{Things standing thus unknown---I leave behind!}\\

\end{verse} \end{flushleft} but Frank Harris, in his Sonia, has rescued her from that injustice,
and enshrined her among the saints. He has lifted the Chicago anarchists
out of their infamy, and shewn that, compared with the Capitalism
that killed them, they were heroes and martyrs. He has done this with
the most unusual power of conviction. The story, as he tells it, inevitably
and irresistibly displaces all the vulgar, mean, purblind, spiteful
versions. There is a precise realism and an unsmiling, measured, determined
sincerity which gives a strange dignity to the work of one whose fixed
practice and ungovernable impulse it is to kick conventional dignity
whenever he sees it.


\section*{\raggedright Harris {}``\emph{durch Mitleid wissend}''}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{Harris {}``\emph{durch Mitleid wissend}''}

\markboth{George Bernard Shaw}{Dark Lady of the Sonnets}

Frank Harris is everything except a humorist, not, apparently, from
stupidity, but because scorn overcomes humor in him. Nobody ever dreamt
of reproaching Milton's Lucifer for not seeing the comic side of his
fall; and nobody who has read Mr Harris's stories desires to have
them lightened by chapters from the hand of Artemus Ward. Yet he knows
the taste and the value of humor. He was one of the few men of letters
who really appreciated Oscar Wilde, though he did not rally fiercely
to Wilde's side until the world deserted Oscar in his ruin. I myself
was present at a curious meeting between the two, when Harris, on
the eve of the Queensberry trial, prophesied to Wilde with miraculous
precision exactly what immediately afterwards happened to him, and
warned him to leave the country. It was the first time within my knowledge
that such a forecast proved true. Wilde, though under no illusion
as to the folly of the quite unselfish suit-at-law he had been persuaded
to begin, nevertheless so miscalculated the force of the social vengeance
he was unloosing on himself that he fancied it could be stayed by
putting up the editor of \emph{The Saturday Review} (as Mr Harris
then was) to declare that he considered \emph{Dorian Grey} a highly
moral book, which it certainly is. When Harris foretold him the truth,
Wilde denounced him as a fainthearted friend who was failing him in
his hour of need, and left the room in anger. Harris's idiosyncratic
power of pity saved him from feeling or shewing the smallest resentment;
and events presently proved to Wilde how insanely he had been advised
in taking the action, and how accurately Harris had gauged the situation.

The same capacity for pity governs Harris's study of Shakespear, whom,
as I have said, he pities too much; but that he is not insensible
to humor is shewn not only by his appreciation of Wilde, but by the
fact that the group of contributors who made his editorship of \emph{The
Saturday Review} so remarkable, and of whom I speak none the less
highly because I happened to be one of them myself, were all, in their
various ways, humorists.


\section*{\raggedright {}``Sidney's Sister: Pembroke's Mother''}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{{}``Sidney's Sister: Pembroke's Mother''}

\markboth{George Bernard Shaw}{Dark Lady of the Sonnets}

And now to return to Shakespear. Though Mr Harris followed Tyler in
identifying Mary Fitton as the Dark Lady, and the Earl of Pembroke
as the addressee of the other sonnets and the man who made love successfully
to Shakespear's mistress, he very characteristically refuses to follow
Tyler on one point, though for the life of me I cannot remember whether
it was one of the surmises which Tyler published, or only one which
he submitted to me to see what I would say about it, just as he used
to submit difficult lines from the sonnets.

This surmise was that {}``Sidney's sister: Pembroke's mother'' set
Shakespear on to persuade Pembroke to marry, and that this was the
explanation of those earlier sonnets which so persistently and unnaturally
urged matrimony on Mr W.\ H.\  I take this to be one of the brightest
of Tyler's ideas, because the persuasions in the sonnets are unaccountable
and out of character unless they were offered to please somebody whom
Shakespear desired to please, and who took a motherly interest in
Pembroke. There is a further temptation in the theory for me. The
most charming of all Shakespear's old women, indeed the most charming
of all his women, young or old, is the Countess of Rousillon in \emph{All's
Well That Ends Well}. It has a certain individuality among them which
suggests a portrait. Mr Harris will have it that all Shakespear's
nice old women are drawn from his beloved mother; but I see no evidence
whatever that Shakespear's mother was a particularly nice woman or
that he was particularly fond of her. That she was a simple incarnation
of extravagant maternal pride like the mother of Coriolanus in Plutarch,
as Mr Harris asserts, I cannot believe: she is quite as likely to
have borne her son a grudge for becoming {}``one of these harlotry
players'' and disgracing the Ardens. Anyhow, as a conjectural model
for the Countess of Rousillon, I prefer that one of whom Jonson wrote
\begin{flushleft} \begin{verse} \footnotesize

Sidney's sister: Pembroke's mother: \\*

Death: ere thou has slain another, \\*

Learnd and fair and good as she, \\*

Time shall throw a dart at thee.

\end{verse} \end{flushleft} But Frank will not have her at any price, because his ideal Shakespear
is rather like a sailor in a melodrama; and a sailor in a melodrama
must adore his mother. I do not at all belittle such sailors. They
are the emblems of human generosity; but Shakespear was not an emblem:
he was a man and the author of \emph{Hamlet}, who had no illusions
about his mother. In weak moments one almost wishes he had.


\section*{\raggedright Shakespear's Social Standing}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{Shakespear's Social Standing}

\markboth{George Bernard Shaw}{Dark Lady of the Sonnets}

On the vexed question of Shakespear's social standing Mr Harris says
that Shakespear {}``had not had the advantage of a middle-class training.''
I suggest that Shakespear missed this questionable advantage, not
because he was socially too low to have attained to it, but because
he conceived himself as belonging to the upper class from which our
public school boys are now drawn. Let Mr Harris survey for a moment
the field of contemporary journalism. He will see there some men who
have the very characteristics from which he infers that Shakespear
was at a social disadvantage through his lack of middle-class training.
They are rowdy, ill-mannered, abusive, mischievous, fond of quoting
obscene schoolboy anecdotes, adepts in that sort of blackmail which
consists in mercilessly libelling and insulting every writer whose
opinions are sufficiently heterodox to make it almost impossible for
him to risk perhaps five years of a slender income by an appeal to
a prejudiced orthodox jury; and they see nothing in all this cruel
blackguardism but an uproariously jolly rag, although they are by
no means without genuine literary ability, a love of letters, and
even some artistic conscience. But he will find not one of the models
of his type (I say nothing of mere imitators of it) below the rank
that looks at the middle class, not humbly and enviously from below,
but insolently from above. Mr Harris himself notes Shakespear's contempt
for the tradesman and mechanic, and his incorrigible addiction to
smutty jokes. He does us the public service of sweeping away the familiar
plea of the Bardolatrous ignoramus, that Shakespear's coarseness was
part of the manners of his time, putting his pen with precision on
the one name, Spenser, that is necessary to expose such a libel on
Elizabethan decency. There was nothing whatever to prevent Shakespear
from being as decent as More was before him, or Bunyan after him,
and as self-respecting as Raleigh or Sidney, except the tradition
of his class, in which education or statesmanship may no doubt be
acquired by those who have a turn for them, but in which insolence,
derision, profligacy, obscene jesting, debt contracting, and rowdy
mischievousness, give continual scandal to the pious, serious, industrious,
solvent bourgeois. No other class is infatuated enough to believe
that gentlemen are born and not made by a very elaborate process of
culture. Even kings are taught and coached and drilled from their
earliest boyhood to play their part. But the man of family (I am convinced
that Shakespear took that view of himself) will plunge into society
without a lesson in table manners, into politics without a lesson
in history, into the city without a lesson in business, and into the
army without a lesson in honor.

It has been said, with the object of proving Shakespear a laborer,
that he could hardly write his name. Why? Because he {}``had not
the advantage of a middle-class training.'' Shakespear himself tells
us, through Hamlet, that gentlemen purposely wrote badly lest they
should be mistaken for scriveners; but most of them, then as now,
wrote badly because they could not write any better. In short, the
whole range of Shakespear's foibles: the snobbishness, the naughtiness,
the contempt for tradesmen and mechanics, the assumption that witty
conversation can only mean smutty conversation, the flunkeyism towards
social superiors and insolence towards social inferiors, the easy
ways with servants which is seen not only between The Two Gentlemen
of Verona and their valets, but in the affection and respect inspired
by a great servant like Adam: all these are the characteristics of
Eton and Harrow, not of the public elementary or private adventure
school. They prove, as everything we know about Shakespear suggests,
that he thought of the Shakespears and Ardens as families of consequence,
and regarded himself as a gentleman under a cloud through his father's
ill luck in business, and never for a moment as a man of the people.
This is at once the explanation of and excuse for his snobbery. He
was not a parvenu trying to cover his humble origin with a purchased
coat of arms: he was a gentleman resuming what he conceived to be
his natural position as soon as he gained the means to keep it up.


\section*{\raggedright This Side Idolatry}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{This Side Idolatry}

\markboth{George Bernard Shaw}{Dark Lady of the Sonnets}

There is another matter which I think Mr Harris should ponder. He
says that Shakespear was but {}``little esteemed by his own generation.''
He even describes Jonson's description of his {}``little Latin and
less Greek'' as a sneer, whereas it occurs in an unmistakably sincere
eulogy of Shakespear, written after his death, and is clearly meant
to heighten the impression of Shakespear's prodigious natural endowments
by pointing out that they were not due to scholastic acquirements.
Now there is a sense in which it is true enough that Shakespear was
too little esteemed by his own generation, or, for the matter of that,
by any subsequent generation. The bargees on the Regent's Canal do
not chant Shakespear's verses as the gondoliers in Venice are said
to chant the verses of Tasso (a practice which was suspended for some
reason during my stay in Venice: at least no gondolier ever did it
in my hearing). Shakespear is no more a popular author than Rodin
is a popular sculptor or Richard Strauss a popular composer. But Shakespear
was certainly not such a fool as to expect the Toms, Dicks, and Harrys
of his time to be any more interested in dramatic poetry than Newton,
later on, expected them to be interested in fluxions. And when we
come to the question whether Shakespear missed that assurance which
all great men have had from the more capable and susceptible members
of their generation that they were great men, Ben Jonson's evidence
disposes of so improbable a notion at once and for ever. {}``I loved
the man,'' says Ben, {}``this side idolatry, as well as any.''
Now why in the name of common sense should he have made that qualification
unless there had been, not only idolatry, but idolatry fulsome enough
to irritate Jonson into an express disavowal of it? Jonson, the bricklayer,
must have felt sore sometimes when Shakespear spoke and wrote of bricklayers
as his inferiors. He must have felt it a little hard that being a
better scholar, and perhaps a braver and tougher man physically than
Shakespear, he was not so successful or so well liked. But in spite
of this he praised Shakespear to the utmost stretch of his powers
of eulogy: in fact, notwithstanding his disclaimer, he did not stop
{}``this side idolatry.'' If, therefore, even Jonson felt himself
forced to clear himself of extravagance and absurdity in his appreciation
of Shakespear, there must have been many people about who idolized
Shakespear as American ladies idolize Paderewski, and who carried
Bardolatry, even in the Bard's own time, to an extent that threatened
to make his reasonable admirers ridiculous.


\section*{\raggedright Shakespear's Pessimism}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{Shakespear's Pessimism}

\markboth{George Bernard Shaw}{Dark Lady of the Sonnets}

I submit to Mr Harris that by ruling out this idolatry, and its possible
effect in making Shakespear think that his public would stand anything
from him, he has ruled out a far more plausible explanation of the
faults of such a play as \emph{Timon of Athens} than his theory that
Shakespear's passion for the Dark Lady {}``cankered and took on proud
flesh in him, and tortured him to nervous breakdown and madness.''
In Timon the intellectual bankruptcy is obvious enough: Shakespear
tried once too often to make a play out of the cheap pessimism which
is thrown into despair by a comparison of actual human nature with
theoretical morality, actual law and administration with abstract
justice, and so forth. But Shakespear's perception of the fact that
all men, judged by the moral standard which they apply to others and
by which they justify their punishment of others, are fools and scoundrels,
does not date from the Dark Lady complication: he seems to have been
born with it. If in \emph{The Comedy of Errors} and \emph{A Midsummer
Night's Dream} the persons of the drama are not quite so ready for
treachery and murder as Laertes and even Hamlet himself (not to mention
the procession of ruffians who pass through the latest plays) it is
certainly not because they have any more regard for law or religion.
There is only one place in Shakespear's plays where the sense of shame
is used as a human attribute; and that is where Hamlet is ashamed,
not of anything he himself has done, but of his mother's relations
with his uncle. This scene is an unnatural one: the son's reproaches
to his mother, even the fact of his being able to discuss the subject
with her, is more repulsive than her relations with her deceased husband's
brother.

Here, too, Shakespear betrays for once his religious sense by making
Hamlet, in his agony of shame, declare that his mother's conduct makes
{}``sweet religion a rhapsody of words.'' But for that passage we
might almost suppose that the feeling of Sunday morning in the country
which Orlando describes so perfectly in \emph{As You Like It} was
the beginning and end of Shakespear's notion of religion. I say almost,
because Isabella in \emph{Measure for Measure} has religious charm,
in spite of the conventional theatrical assumption that female religion
means an inhumanly ferocious chastity. But for the most part Shakespear
differentiates his heroes from his villains much more by what they
do than by what they are. Don John in \emph{Much Ado} is a true villain:
a man with a malicious will; but he is too dull a duffer to be of
any use in a leading part; and when we come to the great villains
like Macbeth, we find, as Mr Harris points out, that they are precisely
identical with the heroes: Macbeth is only Hamlet incongruously committing
murders and engaging in hand-to-hand combats. And Hamlet, who does
not dream of apologizing for the three murders he commits, is always
apologizing because he has not yet committed a fourth, and finds,
to his great bewilderment, that he does not want to commit it. {}``It
cannot be,'' he says, {}``but I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall
to make oppression bitter; else, ere this, I should have fatted all
the region kites with this slave's offal.'' Really one is tempted
to suspect that when Shylock asks {}``Hates any man the thing he
would not kill?''\ he is expressing the natural and proper sentiments
of the human race as Shakespear understood them, and not the vindictiveness
of a stage Jew.


\section*{\raggedright Gaiety of Genius}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{Gaiety of Genius}

\markboth{George Bernard Shaw}{Dark Lady of the Sonnets}

In view of these facts, it is dangerous to cite Shakespear's pessimism
as evidence of the despair of a heart broken by the Dark Lady. There
is an irrepressible gaiety of genius which enables it to bear the
whole weight of the world's misery without blenching. There is a laugh
always ready to avenge its tears of discouragement. In the lines which
Mr Harris quotes only to declare that he can make nothing of them,
and to condemn them as out of character, Richard III, immediately
after pitying himself because \begin{flushleft} \begin{verse} \footnotesize

There is no creature loves me \\*

\mbox{And if I die no soul will pity me} 

\end{verse} \end{flushleft} adds with a grin \begin{flushleft} \begin{verse} \footnotesize

\  \\

\mbox{Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself} \\*

Find in myself no pity for myself?

\end{verse} \end{flushleft}

Let me again remind Mr Harris of Oscar Wilde. We all dreaded to read
\emph{De Profundis}: our instinct was to stop our ears, or run away
from the wail of a broken, though by no means contrite, heart. But
we were throwing away our pity. \emph{De Profundis} was \emph{de profundis}
indeed: Wilde was too good a dramatist to throw away so powerful an
effect; but none the less it was \emph{de profundis in excelsis}.
There was more laughter between the lines of that book than in a thousand
farces by men of no genius. Wilde, like Richard and Shakespear, found
in himself no pity for himself. There is nothing that marks the born
dramatist more unmistakably than this discovery of comedy in his own
misfortunes almost in proportion to the pathos with which the ordinary
man announces their tragedy. I cannot for the life of me see the broken
heart in Shakespear's latest works. {}``Hark, hark!\ the lark at
heaven's gate sings'' is not the lyric of a broken man; nor is Cloten's
comment that if Imogen does not appreciate it, {}``it is a vice in
her ears which horse hairs, and cats' guts, and the voice of unpaved
eunuch to boot, can never amend,'' the sally of a saddened one. Is
it not clear that to the last there was in Shakespear an incorrigible
divine levity, an inexhaustible joy that derided sorrow? Think of
the poor Dark Lady having to stand up to this unbearable power of
extracting a grim fun from everything. Mr Harris writes as if Shakespear
did all the suffering and the Dark Lady all the cruelty. But why does
he not put himself in the Dark Lady's place for a moment as he has
put himself so successfully in Shakespear's? Imagine her reading the
hundred and thirtieth sonnet! \begin{flushleft} \footnotesize

\mbox{My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;} \\*

\mbox{Coral is far more red than her lips' red;} \\*

\mbox{If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;} \\*

\mbox{If hairs be wire, black wires grow on her head;} \\*

\mbox{I have seen roses damasked, red and white,} \\*

\mbox{But no such roses see I in her cheeks;} \\*

\mbox{And in some perfumes is there more delight} \\*

\mbox{Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.} \\*

\mbox{I love to hear her speak; yet well I know} \\*

\mbox{That music hath a far more pleasing sound.} \\*

\mbox{I grant I never saw a goddess go:} \\*

\mbox{My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.} \\*

\mbox{\ \ \ \ And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare} \\*

\mbox{\ \ \ \ As any she belied with false compare.}

\end{flushleft}

Take this as a sample of the sort of compliment from which she was
never for a moment safe with Shakespear. Bear in mind that she was
not a comedian; that the Elizabethan fashion of treating brunettes
as ugly woman must have made her rather sore on the subject of her
complexion; that no human being, male or female, can conceivably enjoy
being chaffed on that point in the fourth couplet about the perfumes;
that Shakespear's revulsions, as the sonnet immediately preceding
shews, were as violent as his ardors, and were expressed with the
realistic power and horror that makes Hamlet say that the heavens
got sick when they saw the queen's conduct; and then ask Mr Harris
whether any woman could have stood it for long, or have thought the
{}``sugred'' compliment worth the cruel wounds, the cleaving of
the heart in twain, that seemed to Shakespear as natural and amusing
a reaction as the burlesquing of his heroics by Pistol, his sermons
by Falstaff, and his poems by Cloten and Touchstone.


\section*{\raggedright Jupiter and Semele}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{Jupiter and Semele}

\markboth{George Bernard Shaw}{Dark Lady of the Sonnets}

This does not mean that Shakespear was cruel: evidently he was not;
but it was not cruelty that made Jupiter reduce Semele to ashes: it
was the fact that he could not help being a god nor she help being
a mortal. The one thing Shakespear's passion for the Dark Lady was
not, was what Mr Harris in one passage calls it: idolatrous. If it
had been, she might have been able to stand it. The man who {}``dotes
yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves,'' is tolerable even by
a spoilt and tyrannical mistress; but what woman could possibly endure
a man who dotes without doubting; who \textit{knows}, and who is hugely
amused at the absurdity of his infatuation for a woman of whose mortal
imperfections not one escapes him: a man always exchanging grins with
Yorick's skull, and inviting {}``my lady'' to laugh at the sepulchral
humor of the fact that though she paint an inch thick (which the Dark
Lady may have done), to Yorick's favor she must come at last. To the
Dark Lady he must sometimes have seemed cruel beyond description:
an intellectual Caliban. True, a Caliban who could say \begin{flushleft} \footnotesize

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises \\*

\mbox{Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.} \\*

\mbox{Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments} \\*

\mbox{Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,} \\*

That, if I then had waked after long sleep \\*

\mbox{Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,} \\*

\mbox{The clouds, methought, would open and shew riches} \\*

Ready to drop on me: that when I wak'd \\*

I cried to dream again.

\end{flushleft} which is very lovely; but the Dark Lady may have had that vice in
her ears which Cloten dreaded: she may not have seen the beauty of
it, whereas there can be no doubt at all that of {}``My mistress'
eyes are nothing like the sun,'' \&c., not a word was lost on her.

And is it to be supposed that Shakespear was too stupid or too modest
not to see at last that it was a case of Jupiter and Semele? Shakespear
was most certainly not modest in that sense. The timid cough of the
minor poet was never heard from him.

\begin{flushleft} \footnotesize

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments \\*

\mbox{Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme}

\end{flushleft} is only one out of a dozen passages in which he (possibly with a
keen sense of the fun of scandalizing the modest coughers) proclaimed
his place and his power in {}``the wide world dreaming of things
to come.'' The Dark Lady most likely thought this side of him insufferably
conceited; for there is no reason to suppose that she liked his plays
any better than Minna Wagner liked Richard's music dramas: as likely
as not, she thought \emph{The Spanish Tragedy} worth six Hamlets.
He was not stupid either: if his class limitations and a profession
that cut him off from actual participation in great affairs of State
had not confined his opportunities of intellectual and political training
to private conversation and to the Mermaid Tavern, he would probably
have become one of the ablest men of his time instead of being merely
its ablest playwright. One might surmise that Shakespear found out
that the Dark Lady's brains could no more keep pace with his than
Anne Hathaway's, if there were any evidence that their friendship
ceased when he stopped writing sonnets to her. As a matter of fact
the consolidation of a passion into an enduring intimacy generally
puts an end to sonnets.

That the Dark Lady broke Shakespear's heart, as Mr Harris will have
it she did, is an extremely unShakespearian hypothesis. {}``Men have
died from time to time, and worms have eaten them; but not for love,''
says Rosalind. Richard of Gloster, into whom Shakespear put all his
own impish superiority to vulgar sentiment, exclaims

\begin{flushleft} \footnotesize

\  \\

\mbox{And this word ``love,'' which greybeards call divine,} \\*

Be resident in men like one another \\*

And not in me: I am myself alone.\\



\end{flushleft}

Hamlet has not a tear for Ophelia: her death moves him to fierce disgust
for the sentimentality of Laertes by her grave; and when he discusses
the scene with Horatio immediately after, he utterly forgets her,
though he is sorry he forgot himself, and jumps at the proposal of
a fencing match to finish the day with. As against this view Mr Harris
pleads Romeo, Orsino, and even Antonio; and he does it so penetratingly
that he convinces you that Shakespear did betray himself again and
again in these characters; but self-betrayal is one thing; and self-portrayal,
as in Hamlet and Mercutio, is another. Shakespear never {}``saw himself,''
as actors say, in Romeo or Orsino or Antonio. In Mr Harris's own play
Shakespear is presented with the most pathetic tenderness. He is tragic,
bitter, pitiable, wretched and broken among a robust crowd of Jonsons
and Elizabeths; but to me he is not Shakespear because I miss the
Shakespearian irony and the Shakespearian gaiety. Take these away
and Shakespear is no longer Shakespear: all the bite, the impetus,
the strength, the grim delight in his own power of looking terrible
facts in the face with a chuckle, is gone; and you have nothing left
but that most depressing of all things: a victim. Now who can think
of Shakespear as a man with a grievance? Even in that most thoroughgoing
and inspired of all Shakespear's loves: his love of music (which Mr
Harris has been the first to appreciate at anything like its value),
there is a dash of mockery. {}``Spit in the hole, man; and tune again.''
{}``Divine air! Now is his soul ravished. Is it not strange that
sheep's guts should hale the souls out of men's bodies?'' {}``An
he had been a dog that should have howled thus, they would have hanged
him.'' There is just as much Shakespear here as in the inevitable
quotation about the sweet south and the bank of violets.

I lay stress on this irony of Shakespear's, this impish rejoicing
in pessimism, this exultation in what breaks the hearts of common
men, not only because it is diagnostic of that immense energy of life
which we call genius, but because its omission is the one glaring
defect in Mr Harris's otherwise extraordinarily penetrating book.
Fortunately, it is an omission that does not disable the book as (in
my judgment) it disabled the hero of the play, because Mr Harris left
himself out of his play, whereas he pervades his book, mordant, deep-voiced,
and with an unconquerable style which is the man.


\section*{\raggedright The Idol of the Bardolaters}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{The Idol of the Bardolaters}

\markboth{George Bernard Shaw}{Dark Lady of the Sonnets}

There is even an advantage in having a book on Shakespear with the
Shakespearian irony left out of account. I do not say that the missing
chapter should not be added in the next edition: the hiatus is too
great: it leaves the reader too uneasy before this touching picture
of a writhing worm substituted for the invulnerable giant. But it
is none the less probable that in no other way could Mr Harris have
got at his man as he has. For, after all, what is the secret of the
hopeless failure of the academic Bardolaters to give us a credible
or even interesting Shakespear, and the easy triumph of Mr Harris
in giving us both? Simply that Mr Harris has assumed that he was dealing
with a man, whilst the others have assumed that they were writing
about a god, and have therefore rejected every consideration of fact,
tradition, or interpretation, that pointed to any human imperfection
in their hero. They thus leave themselves with so little material
that they are forced to begin by saying that we know very little about
Shakespear. As a matter of fact, with the plays and sonnets in our
hands, we know much more about Shakespear than we know about Dickens
or Thackeray: the only difficulty is that we deliberately suppress
it because it proves that Shakespear was not only very unlike the
conception of a god current in Clapham, but was not, according to
the same reckoning, even a respectable man. The academic view starts
with a Shakespear who was not scurrilous; therefore the verses about
{}``lousy Lucy'' cannot have been written by him, and the cognate
passages in the plays are either strokes of character-drawing or gags
interpolated by the actors. This ideal Shakespear was too well behaved
to get drunk; therefore the tradition that his death was hastened
by a drinking bout with Jonson and Drayton must be rejected, and the
remorse of Cassio treated as a thing observed, not experienced: nay,
the disgust of Hamlet at the drinking customs of Denmark is taken
to establish Shakespear as the superior of Alexander in self-control,
and the greatest of teetotallers.

Now this system of inventing your great man to start with, and then
rejecting all the materials that do not fit him, with the ridiculous
result that you have to declare that there are no materials at all
(with your waste-paper basket full of them), ends in leaving Shakespear
with a much worse character than he deserves. For though it does not
greatly matter whether he wrote the lousy Lucy lines or not, and does
not really matter at all whether he got drunk when he made a night
of it with Jonson and Drayton, the sonnets raise an unpleasant question
which does matter a good deal; and the refusal of the academic Bardolaters
to discuss or even mention this question has had the effect of producing
a silent verdict against Shakespear. Mr Harris tackles the question
openly, and has no difficulty whatever in convincing us that Shakespear
was a man of normal constitution sexually, and was not the victim
of that most cruel and pitiable of all the freaks of nature: the freak
which transposes the normal aim of the affections. Silence on this
point means condemnation; and the condemnation has been general throughout
the present generation, though it only needed Mr Harris's fearless
handling of the matter to sweep away what is nothing but a morbid
and very disagreeable modern fashion. There is always some stock accusation
brought against eminent persons. When I was a boy every well-known
man was accused of beating his wife. Later on, for some unexplained
reason, he was accused of psychopathic derangement. And this fashion
is retrospective. The cases of Shakespear and Michel Angelo are cited
as proving that every genius of the first magnitude was a sufferer;
and both here and in Germany there are circles in which such derangement
is grotesquely reverenced as part of the stigmata of heroic powers.
All of which is gross nonsense. Unfortunately, in Shakespear's case,
prudery, which cannot prevent the accusation from being whispered,
does prevent the refutation from being shouted. Mr Harris, the deep-voiced,
refuses to be silenced. He dismisses with proper contempt the stupidity
which places an outrageous construction on Shakespear's apologies
in the sonnets for neglecting that {}``perfect ceremony'' of love
which consists in returning calls and making protestations and giving
presents and paying the trumpery attentions which men of genius always
refuse to bother about, and to which touchy people who have no genius
attach so much importance. No leader who had not been tampered with
by the psychopathic monomaniacs could ever put any construction but
the obvious and innocent one on these passages. But the general vocabulary
of the sonnets to Pembroke (or whoever {}``Mr W.\ H.'' really was)
is so overcharged according to modern ideas that a reply on the general
case is necessary.


\section*{\raggedright Shakespear's alleged Sycophancy and Perversion}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{Shakespear's alleged Sycophancy \\
and Perversion}

\markboth{George Bernard Shaw}{Dark Lady of the Sonnets}

That reply, which Mr Harris does not hesitate to give, is twofold:
first, that Shakespear was, in his attitude towards earls, a sycophant;
and, second, that the normality of Shakespear's sexual constitution
is only too well attested by the excessive susceptibility to the normal
impulse shewn in the whole mass of his writings. This latter is the
really conclusive reply. In the case of Michel Angelo, for instance,
one must admit that if his works are set beside those of Titian or
Paul Veronese, it is impossible not to be struck by the absence in
the Florentine of that susceptibility to feminine charm which pervades
the pictures of the Venetians. But, as Mr Harris points out (though
he does not use this particular illustration) Paul Veronese is an
anchorite compared to Shakespear. The language of the sonnets addressed
to Pembroke, extravagant as it now seems, is the language of compliment
and fashion, transfigured no doubt by Shakespear's verbal magic, and
hyperbolical, as Shakespear always seems to people who cannot conceive
so vividly as he, but still unmistakable for anything else than the
expression of a friendship delicate enough to be wounded, and a manly
loyalty deep enough to be outraged. But the language of the sonnets
to the Dark Lady is the language of passion: their cruelty shews it.
There is no evidence that Shakespear was capable of being unkind in
cold blood. But in his revulsions from love, he was bitter, wounding,
even ferocious; sparing neither himself nor the unfortunate woman
whose only offence was that she had reduced the great man to the common
human denominator.

In seizing on these two points Mr Harris has made so sure a stroke,
and placed his evidence so featly that there is nothing left for me
to do but to plead that the second is sounder than the first, which
is, I think, marked by the prevalent mistake as to Shakespear's social
position, or, if you prefer it, the confusion between his actual social
position as a penniless tradesman's son taking to the theatre for
a livelihood, and his own conception of himself as a gentleman of
good family. I am prepared to contend that though Shakespear was undoubtedly
sentimental in his expressions of devotion to Mr W.\ H. even to a
point which nowadays makes both ridiculous, he was not sycophantic
if Mr W.\ H.\ was really attractive and promising, and Shakespear
deeply attached to him. A sycophant does not tell his patron that
his fame will survive, not in the renown of his own actions, but in
the sonnets of his sycophant. A sycophant, when his patron cuts him
out in a love affair, does not tell his patron exactly what he thinks
of him. Above all, a sycophant does not write to his patron precisely
as he feels on all occasions; and this rare kind of sincerity is all
over the sonnets. Shakespear, we are told, was {}``a very civil gentleman.''
This must mean that his desire to please people and be liked by them,
and his reluctance to hurt their feelings, led him into amiable flattery
even when his feelings were not strongly stirred. If this be taken
into account along with the fact that Shakespear conceived and expressed
all his emotions with a vehemence that sometimes carried him into
ludicrous extravagance, making Richard offer his kingdom for a horse
and Othello declare of Cassio that \begin{flushleft} \begin{verse} \footnotesize

\  \\

\mbox{Had all his hairs been lives, my great revenge} \\*

Had stomach for them all,

\end{verse} \end{flushleft} we shall see more civility and hyperbole than sycophancy even in
the earlier and more coldblooded sonnets.


\section*{\raggedright Shakespear and Democracy}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{Shakespear and Democracy}

\markboth{George Bernard Shaw}{Dark Lady of the Sonnets}

Now take the general case pled against Shakespear as an enemy of democracy
by Tolstoy, the late Ernest Crosbie and others, and endorsed by Mr
Harris. Will it really stand fire? Mr Harris emphasizes the passages
in which Shakespear spoke of mechanics and even of small master tradesmen
as base persons whose clothes were greasy, whose breath was rank,
and whose political imbecility and caprice moved Coriolanus to say
to the Roman Radical who demanded at least {}``good words'' from
him \begin{flushleft} \begin{verse} \footnotesize

\  \\

\mbox{He that will give good words to thee will flatter} \\*

Beneath abhorring.

\end{verse} \end{flushleft}

But let us be honest. As political sentiments these lines are an abomination
to every democrat. But suppose they are not political sentiments!
Suppose they are merely a record of observed fact. John Stuart Mill
told our British workmen that they were mostly liars. Carlyle told
us all that we are mostly fools. Matthew Arnold and Ruskin were more
circumstantial and more abusive. Everybody, including the workers
themselves, know that they are dirty, drunken, foul-mouthed, ignorant,
gluttonous, prejudiced: in short, heirs to the peculiar ills of poverty
and slavery, as well as co-heirs with the plutocracy to all the failings
of human nature. Even Shelley admitted, 200 years after Shakespear
wrote \emph{Coriolanus}, that universal suffrage was out of the question.
Surely the real test, not of Democracy, which was not a live political
issue in Shakespear's time, but of impartiality in judging classes,
which is what one demands from a great human poet, is not that he
should flatter the poor and denounce the rich, but that he should
weigh them both in the same balance. Now whoever will read \emph{Lear}
and \emph{Measure for Measure} will find stamped on his mind such
an appalled sense of the danger of dressing man in a little brief
authority, such a merciless stripping of the purple from the {}``poor,
bare, forked animal'' that calls itself a king and fancies itself
a god, that one wonders what was the real nature of the mysterious
restraint that kept {}``Eliza and our James'' from teaching Shakespear
to be civil to crowned heads, just as one wonders why Tolstoy was
allowed to go free when so many less terrible levellers went to the
galleys or Siberia. From the mature Shakespear we get no such scenes
of village snobbery as that between the stage country gentleman Alexander
Iden and the stage Radical Jack Cade. We get the shepherd in \emph{As
You Like It}, and many honest, brave, human, and loyal servants, beside
the inevitable comic ones. Even in the Jingo play, \emph{Henry V},
we get Bates and Williams drawn with all respect and honor as normal
rank and file men. In \emph{Julius Caesar}, Shakespear went to work
with a will when he took his cue from Plutarch in glorifying regicide
and transfiguring the republicans. Indeed hero-worshippers have never
forgiven him for belittling Caesar and failing to see that side of
his assassination which made Goethe denounce it as the most senseless
of crimes. Put the play beside the \emph{Charles I} of Wills, in which
Cromwell is written down to a point at which the Jack Cade of \emph{Henry
VI} becomes a hero in comparison; and then believe, if you can, that
Shakespear was one of them that {}``crook the pregnant hinges of
the knee where thrift may follow fawning.'' Think of Rosencrantz,
Guildenstern, Osric, the fop who annoyed Hotspur, and a dozen passages
concerning such people! If such evidence can prove anything (and Mr
Harris relies throughout on such evidence) Shakespear loathed courtiers.

If, on the other hand, Shakespear's characters are mostly members
of the leisured classes, the same thing is true of Mr Harris's own
plays and mine. Industrial slavery is not compatible with that freedom
of adventure, that personal refinement and intellectual culture, that
scope of action, which the higher and subtler drama demands.

Even Cervantes had finally to drop Don Quixote's troubles with innkeepers
demanding to be paid for his food and lodging, and make him as free
of economic difficulties as Amadis de Gaul. Hamlet's experiences simply
could not have happened to a plumber. A poor man is useful on the
stage only as a blind man is: to excite sympathy. The poverty of the
apothecary in \emph{Romeo and Juliet} produces a great effect, and
even points the sound moral that a poor man cannot afford to have
a conscience; but if all the characters of the play had been as poor
as he, it would have been nothing but a melodrama of the sort that
the Sicilian players gave us here; and that was not the best that
lay in Shakespear's power. When poverty is abolished, and leisure
and grace of life become general, the only plays surviving from our
epoch which will have any relation to life as it will be lived then
will be those in which none of the persons represented are troubled
with want of money or wretched drudgery. Our plays of poverty and
squalor, now the only ones that are true to the life of the majority
of living men, will then be classed with the records of misers and
monsters, and read only by historical students of social pathology.

Then consider Shakespear's kings and lords and gentlemen! Would even
John Ball or Jeremiah complain that they are flattered? Surely a more
mercilessly exposed string of scoundrels never crossed the stage.
The very monarch who paralyzes a rebel by appealing to the divinity
that hedges a king, is a drunken and sensual assassin, and is presently
killed contemptuously before our eyes in spite of his hedge of divinity.
I could write as convincing a chapter on Shakespear's Dickensian prejudice
against the throne and the nobility and gentry in general as Mr Harris
or Ernest Crosbie on the other side. I could even go so far as to
contend that one of Shakespear's defects is his lack of an intelligent
comprehension of feudalism. He had of course no prevision of democratic
Collectivism. He was, except in the commonplaces of war and patriotism,
a privateer through and through. Nobody in his plays, whether king
or citizen, has any civil public business or conception of such a
thing, except in the method of appointing constables, to the abuses
in which he called attention quite in the vein of the Fabian Society.
He was concerned about drunkenness and about the idolatry and hypocrisy
of our judicial system; but his implied remedy was personal sobriety
and freedom from idolatrous illusion in so far as he had any remedy
at all, and did not merely despair of human nature. His first and
last word on parliament was {}``Get thee glass eyes, and, like a
scurvy politician, seem to see the thing thou dost not.'' He had
no notion of the feeling with which the land nationalizers of today
regard the fact that he was a party to the enclosure of common lands
at Wellcome. The explanation is, not a general deficiency in his mind,
but the simple fact that in his day what English land needed was individual
appropriation and cultivation, and what the English Constitution needed
was the incorporation of Whig principles of individual liberty.


\section*{\raggedright Shakespear and the British Public}

\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{Shakespear and the British Public}

\markboth{George Bernard Shaw}{Dark Lady of the Sonnets}

I have rejected Mr Harris's view that Shakespear died broken-hearted
of {}``the pangs of love despised.'' I have given my reasons for
believing that Shakespear died game, and indeed in a state of levity
which would have been considered unbecoming in a bishop. But Mr Harris's
evidence does prove that Shakespear had a grievance and a very serious
one. He might have been jilted by ten dark ladies and been none the
worse for it; but his treatment by the British Public was another
matter. The idolatry which exasperated Ben Jonson was by no means
a popular movement; and, like all such idolatries, it was excited
by the magic of Shakespear's art rather than by his views.

He was launched on his career as a successful playwright by the \emph{Henry
VI} trilogy, a work of no originality, depth, or subtlety except the
originality, depth, and subtlety of the feelings and fancies of the
common people. But Shakespear was not satisfied with this. What is
the use of being Shakespear if you are not allowed to express any
notions but those of Autolycus? Shakespear did not see the world as
Autolycus did: he saw it, if not exactly as Ibsen did (for it was
not quite the same world), at least with much of Ibsen's power of
penetrating its illusions and idolatries, and with all Swift's horror
of its cruelty and uncleanliness.

Now it happens to some men with these powers that they are forced
to impose their fullest exercise on the world because they cannot
produce popular work. Take Wagner and Ibsen for instance! Their earlier
works are no doubt much cheaper than their later ones; still, they
were not popular when they were written. The alternative of doing
popular work was never really open to them: had they stooped they
would have picked up less than they snatched from above the people's
heads. But Handel and Shakespear were not held to their best in this
way. They could turn out anything they were asked for, and even heap
up the measure. They reviled the British Public, and never forgave
it for ignoring their best work and admiring their splendid commonplaces;
but they produced the commonplaces all the same, and made them sound
magnificent by mere brute faculty for their art. When Shakespear was
forced to write popular plays to save his theatre from ruin, he did
it mutinously, calling the plays {}``\emph{As} \textit{\emph{You}}
\emph{Like It},'' and {}``\emph{Much Ado About Nothing}.'' All
the same, he did it so well that to this day these two genial vulgarities
are the main Shakespearian stock-in-trade of our theatres. Later on
Burbage's power and popularity as an actor enabled Shakespear to free
himself from the tyranny of the box office, and to express himself
more freely in plays consisting largely of monologue to be spoken
by a great actor from whom the public would stand a good deal. The
history of Shakespear's tragedies has thus been the history of a long
line of famous actors, from Burbage and Betterton to Forbes Robertson;
and the man of whom we are told that {}``when he would have said
that Richard died, and cried A horse! A horse! he Burbage cried''
was the father of nine generations of Shakespearian playgoers, all
speaking of Garrick's Richard, and Kean's Othello, and Irving's Shylock,
and Forbes Robertson's Hamlet without knowing or caring how much these
had to do with Shakespear's Richard and Othello and so forth. And
the plays which were written without great and predominant parts,
such as \emph{Troilus and Cressida}, \emph{All's Well That Ends Well},
and \emph{Measure for Measure}, have dropped on our stage as dead
as the second part of Goethe's \emph{Faust} or Ibsen's \emph{Emperor}
or \emph{Galilean}.

Here, then, Shakespear had a real grievance; and though it is a sentimental
exaggeration to describe him as a broken-hearted man in the face of
the passages of reckless jollity and serenely happy poetry in his
latest plays, yet the discovery that his most serious work could reach
success only when carried on the back of a very fascinating actor
who was enormously overcharging his part, and that the serious plays
which did not contain parts big enough to hold the overcharge were
left on the shelf, amply accounts for the evident fact that Shakespear
did not end his life in a glow of enthusiastic satisfaction with mankind
and with the theatre, which is all that Mr Harris can allege in support
of his broken-heart theory. But even if Shakespear had had no failures,
it was not possible for a man of his powers to observe the political
and moral conduct of his contemporaries without perceiving that they
were incapable of dealing with the problems raised by their own civilization,
and that their attempts to carry out the codes of law and to practise
the religions offered to them by great prophets and law-givers were
and still are so foolish that we now call for The Superman, virtually
a new species, to rescue the world from mismanagement. This is the
real sorrow of great men; and in the face of it the notion that when
a great man speaks bitterly or looks melancholy he must be troubled
by a disappointment in love seems to me sentimental trifling.

If I have carried the reader with me thus far, he will find that trivial
as this little play of mine is, its sketch of Shakespear is more complete
than its levity suggests. Alas! its appeal for a National Theatre
as a monument to Shakespear failed to touch the very stupid people
who cannot see that a National Theatre is worth having for the sake
of the National Soul. I had unfortunately represented Shakespear as
treasuring and using (as I do myself) the jewels of unconsciously
musical speech which common people utter and throw away every day;
and this was taken as a disparagement of Shakespear's {}``originality.''
Why was I born with such contemporaries? Why is Shakespear made ridiculous
by such a posterity?


\chapter*{\raggedright THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS}

\markboth{George Bernard Shaw}{Dark Lady of the Sonnets}

\textit{\emph{Fin de siecle}} \textit{15-1600. Midsummer night on
the terrace of the Palace at Whitehall, overlooking the Thames. The
Palace clock chimes four quarters and strikes eleven.}

\textit{A Beefeater on guard. A Cloaked Man approaches.}

THE BEEFEATER. Stand. Who goes there? Give the word.

THE MAN. Marry! I cannot. I have clean forgotten it.

THE BEEFEATER. Then cannot you pass here. What is your business? Who
are you? Are you a true man?

THE MAN. Far from it, Master Warder. I am not the same man two days
together: sometimes Adam, sometimes Benvolio, and anon the Ghost.

THE BEEFEATER.\  \textit{{[}recoiling{]}} A ghost! Angels and ministers
of grace defend us!

THE MAN. Well said, Master Warder. With your leave I will set that
down in writing; for I have a very poor and unhappy brain for remembrance.\ 
\textit{{[}He takes out his tablets and writes{]}.} Methinks this
is a good scene, with you on your lonely watch, and I approaching
like a ghost in the moonlight. Stare not so amazedly at me; but mark
what I say. I keep tryst here to-night with a dark lady. She promised
to bribe the warder. I gave her the wherewithal: four tickets for
the Globe Theatre.

THE BEEFEATER. Plague on her! She gave me two only.

THE MAN.\  \textit{{[}detaching a tablet{]}} My friend: present this
tablet, and you will be welcomed at any time when the plays of Will
Shakespear are in hand. Bring your wife. Bring your friends. Bring
the whole garrison. There is ever plenty of room.

THE BEEFEATER. I care not for these new-fangled plays. No man can
understand a word of them. They are all talk. Will you not give me
a pass for The Spanish Tragedy?

THE MAN. To see The Spanish Tragedy one pays, my friend. Here are
the means.\  \textit{{[}He gives him a piece of gold{]}.}

THE BEEFEATER.\  \textit{{[}overwhelmed{]}} Gold! Oh, sir, you are
a better paymaster than your dark lady.

THE MAN. Women are thrifty, my friend.

THE BEEFEATER. Tis so, sir. And you have to consider that the most
open handed of us must een cheapen that which we buy every day. This
lady has to make a present to a warder nigh every night of her life.

THE MAN.\  \textit{{[}turning pale{]}} I'll not believe it.

THE BEEFEATER. Now you, sir, I dare be sworn, do not have an adventure
like this twice in the year.

THE MAN. Villain: wouldst tell me that my dark lady hath ever done
thus before? that she maketh occasions to meet other men?

THE BEEFEATER. Now the Lord bless your innocence, sir, do you think
you are the only pretty man in the world? A merry lady, sir: a warm
bit of stuff. Go to: I'll not see her pass a deceit on a gentleman
that hath given me the first piece of gold I ever handled.

THE MAN. Master Warder: is it not a strange thing that we, knowing
that all women are false, should be amazed to find our own particular
drab no better than the rest?

THE BEEFEATER. Not all, sir. Decent bodies, many of them.

THE MAN.\  \textit{{[}intolerantly{]}} No. All false. All. If thou
deny it, thou liest.

THE BEEFEATER. You judge too much by the Court, sir. There, indeed,
you may say of frailty that its name is woman.

THE MAN.\  \textit{{[}pulling out his tablets again{]}} Prithee say
that again: that about frailty: the strain of music.

THE BEEFEATER. What strain of music, sir? I'm no musician, God knows.

THE MAN. There is music in your soul: many of your degree have it
very notably.\  \textit{{[}Writing{]}} {}``Frailty: thy name is
woman!'' \textit{{[}Repeating it affectionately{]}} {}``Thy name
is woman.''

THE BEEFEATER. Well, sir, it is but four words. Are you a snapper-up
of such unconsidered trifles?

THE MAN.\  \textit{{[}eagerly{]}} Snapper-up of\mbox{---} \textit{{[}he
gasps{]}} Oh! Immortal phrase! \textit{{[}He writes it down{]}.} This
man is a greater than I.

THE BEEFEATER. You have my lord Pembroke's trick, sir.

THE MAN. Like enough: he is my near friend. But what call you his
trick?

THE BEEFEATER. Making sonnets by moonlight. And to the same lady too.

THE MAN. No!

THE BEEFEATER. Last night he stood here on your errand, and in your
shoes.

THE MAN. Thou, too, Brutus! And I called him friend!

THE BEEFEATER. Tis ever so, sir.

THE MAN. Tis ever so. Twas ever so.\  \textit{{[}He turns away, overcome{]}.}
Two Gentlemen of Verona! Judas! Judas!!

THE BEEFEATER. Is he so bad as that, sir?

THE MAN.\  \textit{{[}recovering his charity and self-possession{]}}
Bad? Oh no. Human, Master Warder, human. We call one another names
when we are offended, as children do. That is all.

THE BEEFEATER. Ay, sir: words, words, words. Mere wind, sir. We fill
our bellies with the east wind, sir, as the Scripture hath it. You
cannot feed capons so.

THE MAN. A good cadence. By your leave \textit{{[}He makes a note
of it{]}.}

THE BEEFEATER. What manner of thing is a cadence, sir? I have not
heard of it.

THE MAN. A thing to rule the world with, friend.

THE BEEFEATER. You speak strangely, sir: no offence. But, an't like
you, you are a very civil gentleman; and a poor man feels drawn to
you, you being, as twere, willing to share your thought with him.

THE MAN. Tis my trade. But alas!\ the world for the most part will
none of my thoughts.

\textit{Lamplight streams from the palace door as it opens from within.}

THE BEEFEATER. Here comes your lady, sir. I'll to t'other end of my
ward. You may een take your time about your business: I shall not
return too suddenly unless my sergeant comes prowling round. Tis a
fell sergeant, sir: strict in his arrest. Go'd'en, sir; and good luck!
\textit{{[}He goes{]}.}

THE MAN. {}``Strict in his arrest''! {}``Fell sergeant''! \textit{{[}As
if tasting a ripe plum{]}} O-o-o-h! \textit{{[}He makes a note of
them{]}.}

\textit{A Cloaked Lady gropes her way from the palace and wanders
along the terrace, walking in her sleep.}

THE LADY.\  \textit{{[}rubbing her hands as if washing them{]}} Out,
damned spot. You will mar all with these cosmetics. God made you one
face; and you make yourself another. Think of your grave, woman, not
ever of being beautified. All the perfumes of Arabia will not whiten
this Tudor hand.

THE MAN. {}``All the perfumes of Arabia''! {}``Beautified''! {}``Beautified''!
a poem in a single word. Can this be my Mary? \textit{{[}To the Lady{]}}
Why do you speak in a strange voice, and utter poetry for the first
time? Are you ailing? You walk like the dead. Mary! Mary!

THE LADY.\  \textit{{[}echoing him{]}} Mary! Mary! Who would have
thought that woman to have had so much blood in her! Is it my fault
that my counsellors put deeds of blood on me? Fie! If you were women
you would have more wit than to stain the floor so foully. Hold not
up her head so: the hair is false. I tell you yet again, Mary's buried:
she cannot come out of her grave. I fear her not: these cats that
dare jump into thrones though they be fit only for men's laps must
be put away. Whats done cannot be undone. Out, I say. Fie! a queen,
and freckled!

THE MAN.\  \textit{{[}shaking her arm{]}} Mary, I say: art asleep?

\textit{The Lady wakes; starts; and nearly faints. He catches her
on his arm.}

THE LADY. Where am I? What art thou?

THE MAN. I cry your mercy. I have mistook your person all this while.
Methought you were my Mary: my mistress.

THE LADY.\  \textit{{[}outraged{]}} Profane fellow: how do you dare?

THE MAN. Be not wroth with me, lady. My mistress is a marvellous proper
woman. But she does not speak so well as you. {}``All the perfumes
of Arabia''! That was well said: spoken with good accent and excellent
discretion.

THE LADY. Have I been in speech with you here?

THE MAN. Why, yes, fair lady. Have you forgot it?

THE LADY. I have walked in my sleep.

THE MAN. Walk ever in your sleep, fair one; for then your words drop
like honey.

THE LADY.\  \textit{{[}with cold majesty{]}} Know you to whom you
speak, sir, that you dare express yourself so saucily?

THE MAN.\  \textit{{[}unabashed{]}} Not I, not care neither. You
are some lady of the Court, belike. To me there are but two sorts
of women: those with excellent voices, sweet and low, and cackling
hens that cannot make me dream. Your voice has all manner of loveliness
in it. Grudge me not a short hour of its music.

THE LADY. Sir: you are overbold. Season your admiration for a while
with\mbox{---}

THE MAN.\  \textit{{[}holding up his hand to stop her{]}} {}``Season
your admiration for a while\mbox{---}''

THE LADY. Fellow: do you dare mimic me to my face?

THE MAN. Tis music. Can you not hear? When a good musician sings a
song, do you not sing it and sing it again till you have caught and
fixed its perfect melody? {}``Season your admiration for a while'':
God! the history of man's heart is in that one word admiration. Admiration!
\textit{{[}Taking up his tablets{]}} What was it? {}``Suspend your
admiration for a space\mbox{---}''

THE LADY. A very vile jingle of esses. I said {}``Season your\mbox{---}''

THE MAN.\  \textit{{[}hastily{]}} Season: ay, season, season, season.
Plague on my memory, my wretched memory! I must een write it down.\ 
\textit{{[}He begins to write, but stops, his memory failing him{]}.}
Yet tell me which was the vile jingle? You said very justly: mine
own ear caught it even as my false tongue said it.

THE LADY. You said {}``for a space.'' I said {}``for a while.''

THE MAN. {}``For a while'' \textit{{[}he corrects it{]}.} Good!
\textit{{[}Ardently{]}} And now be mine neither for a space nor a
while, but for ever.

THE LADY. Odds my life! Are you by chance making love to me, knave?

THE MAN. Nay: tis you who have made the love: I but pour it out at
your feet. I cannot but love a lass that sets such store by an apt
word. Therefore vouchsafe, divine perfection of a woman\mbox{---}no:
I have said that before somewhere; and the wordy garment of my love
for you must be fire-new\mbox{---}

THE LADY. You talk too much, sir. Let me warn you: I am more accustomed
to be listened to than preached at.

THE MAN. The most are like that that do talk well. But though you
spake with the tongues of angels, as indeed you do, yet know that
I am the king of words\mbox{---}

THE LADY. A king, ha!

THE MAN. No less. We are poor things, we men and women\mbox{---}

THE LADY. Dare you call me woman?

THE MAN. What nobler name can I tender you? How else can I love you?
Yet you may well shrink from the name: have I not said we are but
poor things? Yet there is a power that can redeem us.

THE LADY. Gramercy for your sermon, sir. I hope I know my duty.

THE MAN. This is no sermon, but the living truth. The power I speak
of is the power of immortal poesy. For know that vile as this world
is, and worms as we are, you have but to invest all this vileness
with a magical garment of words to transfigure us and uplift our souls
til earth flowers into a million heavens.

THE LADY. You spoil your heaven with your million. You are extravagant.
Observe some measure in your speech.

THE MAN. You speak now as Ben does.

THE LADY. And who, pray, is Ben?

THE MAN. A learned bricklayer who thinks that the sky is at the top
of his ladder, and so takes it on him to rebuke me for flying. I tell
you there is no word yet coined and no melody yet sung that is extravagant
and majestical enough for the glory that lovely words can reveal.
It is heresy to deny it: have you not been taught that in the beginning
was the Word? that the Word was with God? nay, that the Word was God?

THE LADY. Beware, fellow, how you presume to speak of holy things.
The Queen is the head of the Church.

THE MAN. You are the head of my Church when you speak as you did at
first. {}``All the perfumes of Arabia''! Can the Queen speak thus?
They say she playeth well upon the virginals. Let her play so to me;
and I'll kiss her hands. But until then, you are my Queen; and I'll
kiss those lips that have dropt music on my heart.\  \textit{{[}He
puts his arms abont her{]}.}

THE LADY. Unmeasured impudence! On your life, take your hands from
me.

\textit{The Dark Lady comes stooping along the terrace behind them
like a running thrush. When she sees how they are employed, she rises
angrily to her full height, and listens jealously.}

THE MAN.\  \textit{{[}unaware of the Dark Lady{]}} Then cease to
make my hands tremble with the streams of life you pour through them.
You hold me as the lodestar holds the iron: I cannot but cling to
you. We are lost, you and I: nothing can separate us now.

THE DARK LADY. We shall see that, false lying hound, you and your
filthy trull.\  \textit{{[}With two vigorous cuffs, she knocks the
pair asunder, sending the man, who is unlucky enough to receive a
righthanded blow, sprawling an the flags{]}.} Take that, both of you!

THE CLOAKED LADY.\  \textit{{[}in towering wrath, throwing off her
cloak and turning in outraged majesty on her assailant{]}} High treason!

THE DARK LADY.\  \textit{{[}recognizing her and falling on her knees
in abject terror{]}} Will: I am lost: I have struck the Queen.

THE MAN.\  \textit{{[}sitting up as majestically as his ignominious
posture allows{]}} Woman: you have struck \emph{William Shakespear}.

QUEEN ELIZABETH.\  \textit{{[}stupent{]}} Marry, come up!!! Struck
William Shakespear quotha! And who in the name of all the sluts and
jades and light-o'-loves and fly-by-nights that infest this palace
of mine, may William Shakespear be?

THE DARK LADY. Madam: he is but a player. Oh, I could have my hand
cut off\mbox{---}

QUEEN ELIZABETH. Belike you will, mistress. Have you bethought you
that I am like to have your head cut off as well?

THE DARK LADY. Will: save me. Oh, save me.

ELIZABETH. Save you! A likely savior, on my royal word! I had thought
this fellow at least an esquire; for I had hoped that even the vilest
of my ladies would not have dishonored my Court by wantoning with
a baseborn servant.

SHAKESPEAR.\  \textit{{[}indignantly scrambling to his feet{]}} Base-born!
I, a Shakespear of Stratford! I, whose mother was an Arden! baseborn!
You forget yourself, madam.

ELIZABETH.\  \textit{{[}furious{]}} S'blood! do I so? I will teach
you\mbox{---}

THE DARK LADY.\  \textit{{[}rising from her knees and throwing herself
between them{]}} Will: in God's name anger her no further. It is death.
Madam: do not listen to him.

SHAKESPEAR. Not were it een to save your life, Mary, not to mention
mine own, will I flatter a monarch who forgets what is due to my family.
I deny not that my father was brought down to be a poor bankrupt;
but twas his gentle blood that was ever too generous for trade. Never
did he disown his debts. Tis true he paid them not; but it is an attested
truth that he gave bills for them; and twas those bills, in the hands
of base hucksters, that were his undoing.

ELIZABETH.\  \textit{{[}grimly{]}} The son of your father shall learn
his place in the presence of the daughter of Harry the Eighth.

SHAKESPEAR.\  \textit{{[}swelling with intolerant importance{]}}
Name not that inordinate man in the same breath with Stratford's worthiest
alderman. John Shakespear wedded but once: Harry Tudor was married
six times. You should blush to utter his name.

\emph{Crying out together:}

\begin{tabular}{@{}l|p{1.6in}}

THE DARK LADY. & Will:\ for pity's sake--- \\*

ELIZABETH. & Insolent dog--- \end{tabular}

SHAKESPEAR.\  \textit{{[}cutting them short{]}} How know you that
King Harry was indeed your father?

\begin{tabular}{@{}l|p{1.6in}}

ELIZABETH. & Zounds!   Now by\mbox{---} \textit{[she stops to grind her teeth with rage].} \\*

THE DARK LADY. & She will have me whipped through the streets. Oh God! Oh God! \end{tabular}

SHAKESPEAR. Learn to know yourself better, madam. I am an honest gentleman
of unquestioned parentage, and have already sent in my demand for
the coat-of-arms that is lawfully mine. Can you say as much for yourself?

ELIZABETH.\  \textit{{[}almost beside herself{]}} Another word; and
I begin with mine own hands the work the hangman shall finish.

SHAKESPEAR. You are no true Tudor: this baggage here has as good a
right to your royal seat as you. What maintains you on the throne
of England? Is it your renowned wit? your wisdom that sets at naught
the craftiest statesmen of the Christian world? No. Tis the mere chance
that might have happened to any milkmaid, the caprice of Nature that
made you the most wondrous piece of beauty the age hath seen. \textit{{[}Elizabeth's
raised fists, on the point of striking him, fall to her side{]}.}
That is what hath brought all men to your feet, and founded your throne
on the impregnable rock of your proud heart, a stony island in a sea
of desire. There, madam, is some wholesome blunt honest speaking for
you. Now do your worst.

ELIZABETH.\  \textit{{[}with dignity{]}} Master Shakespear: it is
well for you that I am a merciful prince. I make allowance for your
rustic ignorance. But remember that there are things which be true,
and are yet not seemly to be said (I will not say to a queen; for
you will have it that I am none) but to a virgin.

SHAKESPEAR.\  \textit{{[}bluntly{]}} It is no fault of mine that
you are a virgin, madam, albeit tis my misfortune.

THE DARK LADY.\  \textit{{[}terrified again{]}} In mercy, madam,
hold no further discourse with him. He hath ever some lewd jest on
his tongue. You hear how he useth me! calling me baggage and the like
to your Majesty's face.

ELIZABETH. As for you, mistress, I have yet to demand what your business
is at this hour in this place, and how you come to be so concerned
with a player that you strike blindly at your sovereign in your jealousy
of him.

THE DARK LADY. Madam: as I live and hope for salvation\mbox{---}

SHAKESPEAR.\  \textit{{[}sardonically{]}} Ha!

THE DARK LADY.\  \textit{{[}angrily{]}} \mbox{---}ay, I'm as like
to be saved as thou that believest naught save some black magic of
words and verses\mbox{---}I say, madam, as I am a living woman I
came here to break with him for ever. Oh, madam, if you would know
what misery is, listen to this man that is more than man and less
at the same time. He will tie you down to anatomize your very soul:
he will wring tears of blood from your humiliation; and then he will
heal the wound with flatteries that no woman can resist.

SHAKESPEAR. Flatteries! \textit{{[}Kneeling{]}} Oh, madam, I put my
case at your royal feet. I confess to much. I have a rude tongue:
I am unmannerly: I blaspheme against the holiness of anointed royalty;
but oh, my royal mistress, \emph{am} I a flatterer?

ELIZABETH. I absolve you as to that. You are far too plain a dealer
to please me.\  \textit{{[}He rises gratefully{]}.}

THE DARK LADY. Madam: he is flattering you even as he speaks.

ELIZABETH.\  \textit{{[}a terrible flash in her eye{]}} Ha! Is it
so?

SHAKESPEAR. Madam: she is jealous; and, heaven help me!\ not without
reason. Oh, you say you are a merciful prince; but that was cruel
of you, that hiding of your royal dignity when you found me here.
For how can I ever be content with this black-haired, black-eyed,
black-avised devil again now that I have looked upon real beauty and
real majesty?

THE DARK LADY.\  \textit{{[}wounded and desperate{]}} He hath swore
to me ten times over that the day shall come in England when black
women, for all their foulness, shall be more thought on than fair
ones.\  \textit{{[}To Shakespear, scolding at him{]}} Deny it if
thou canst. Oh, he is compact of lies and scorns. I am tired of being
tossed up to heaven and dragged down to hell at every whim that takes
him. I am ashamed to my very soul that I have abased myself to love
one that my father would not have deemed fit to hold my stirrup\mbox{---}one
that will talk to all the world about me\mbox{---}that will put my
love and my shame into his plays and make me blush for myself there\mbox{---}that
will write sonnets about me that no man of gentle strain would put
his hand to. I am all disordered: I know not what I am saying to your
Majesty: I am of all ladies most deject and wretched\mbox{---}

SHAKESPEAR. Ha! At last sorrow hath struck a note of music out of
thee. {}``Of all ladies most deject and wretched.'' \textit{{[}He
makes a note of it{]}.}

THE DARK LADY. Madam: I implore you give me leave to go. I am distracted
with grief and shame. I\mbox{---}

ELIZABETH. Go \textit{{[}The Dark Lady tries to kiss her hand{]}.}
No more. Go.\  \textit{{[}The Dark Lady goes, convulsed{]}.} You
have been cruel to that poor fond wretch, Master Shakespear.

SHAKESPEAR. I am not cruel, madam; but you know the fable of Jupiter
and Semele. I could not help my lightnings scorching her.

ELIZABETH. You have an overweening conceit of yourself, sir, that
displeases your Queen.

SHAKESPEAR. Oh, madam, can I go about with the modest cough of a minor
poet, belittling my inspiration and making the mightiest wonder of
your reign a thing of nought? I have said that {}``not marble nor
the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive'' the words with which
I make the world glorious or foolish at my will. Besides, I would
have you think me great enough to grant me a boon.

ELIZABETH. I hope it is a boon that may be asked of a virgin Queen
without offence, sir. I mistrust your forwardness; and I bid you remember
that I do not suffer persons of your degree (if I may say so without
offence to your father the alderman) to presume too far.

SHAKESPEAR. Oh, madam, I shall not forget myself again; though by
my life, could I make you a serving wench, neither a queen nor a virgin
should you be for so much longer as a flash of lightning might take
to cross the river to the Bankside. But since you are a queen and
will none of me, nor of Philip of Spain, nor of any other mortal man,
I must een contain myself as best I may, and ask you only for a boon
of State.

ELIZABETH. A boon of State already! You are becoming a courtier like
the rest of them. You lack advancement.

SHAKESPEAR. {}``Lack advancement.'' By your Majesty's leave: a queenly
phrase.\  \textit{{[}He is about to write it down{]}.}

ELIZABETH.\  \textit{{[}striking the tablets from his hand{]}} Your
tables begin to anger me, sir. I am not here to write your plays for
you.

SHAKESPEAR. You are here to inspire them, madam. For this, among the
rest, were you ordained. But the boon I crave is that you do endow
a great playhouse, or, if I may make bold to coin a scholarly name
for it, a National Theatre, for the better instruction and gracing
of your Majesty's subjects.

ELIZABETH. Why, sir, are there not theatres enow on the Bankside and
in Blackfriars?

SHAKESPEAR. Madam: these are the adventures of needy and desperate
men that must, to save themselves from perishing of want, give the
sillier sort of people what they best like; and what they best like,
God knows, is not their own betterment and instruction, as we well
see by the example of the churches, which must needs compel men to
frequent them, though they be open to all without charge. Only when
there is a matter of a murder, or a plot, or a pretty youth in petticoats,
or some naughty tale of wantonness, will your subjects pay the great
cost of good players and their finery, with a little profit to boot.
To prove this I will tell you that I have written two noble and excellent
plays setting forth the advancement of women of high nature and fruitful
industry even as your Majesty is: the one a skilful physician, the
other a sister devoted to good works. I have also stole from a book
of idle wanton tales two of the most damnable foolishnesses in the
world, in the one of which a woman goeth in man's attire and maketh
impudent love to her swain, who pleaseth the groundlings by overthrowing
a wrestler; whilst, in the other, one of the same kidney sheweth her
wit by saying endless naughtinesses to a gentleman as lewd as herself.
I have writ these to save my friends from penury, yet shewing my scorn
for such follies and for them that praise them by calling the one
As You Like It, meaning that it is not as \textit{I} like it, and
the other Much Ado About Nothing, as it truly is. And now these two
filthy pieces drive their nobler fellows from the stage, where indeed
I cannot have my lady physician presented at all, she being too honest
a woman for the taste of the town. Wherefore I humbly beg your Majesty
to give order that a theatre be endowed out of the public revenue
for the playing of those pieces of mine which no merchant will touch,
seeing that his gain is so much greater with the worse than with the
better. Thereby you shall also encourage other men to undertake the
writing of plays who do now despise it and leave it wholly to those
whose counsels will work little good to your realm. For this writing
of plays is a great matter, forming as it does the minds and affections
of men in such sort that whatsoever they see done in show on the stage,
they will presently be doing in earnest in the world, which is but
a larger stage. Of late, as you know, the Church taught the people
by means of plays; but the people flocked only to such as were full
of superstitious miracles and bloody martyrdoms; and so the Church,
which also was just then brought into straits by the policy of your
royal father, did abandon and discountenance the art of playing; and
thus it fell into the hands of poor players and greedy merchants that
had their pockets to look to and not the greatness of this your kingdom.
Therefore now must your Majesty take up that good work that your Church
hath abandoned, and restore the art of playing to its former use and
dignity.

ELIZABETH. Master Shakespear: I will speak of this matter to the Lord
Treasurer.

SHAKESPEAR. Then am I undone, madam; for there was never yet a Lord
Treasurer that could find a penny for anything over and above the
necessary expenses of your government, save for a war or a salary
for his own nephew.

ELIZABETH. Master Shakespear: you speak sooth; yet cannot I in any
wise mend it. I dare not offend my unruly Puritans by making so lewd
a place as the playhouse a public charge; and there be a thousand
things to be done in this London of mine before your poetry can have
its penny from the general purse. I tell thee, Master Will, it will
be three hundred years and more before my subjects learn that man
cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that cometh from the
mouth of those whom God inspires. By that time you and I will be dust
beneath the feet of the horses, if indeed there be any horses then,
and men be still riding instead of flying. Now it may be that by then
your works will be dust also.

SHAKESPEAR. They will stand, madam: fear nor for that.

ELIZABETH. It may prove so. But of this I am certain (for I know my
countrymen) that until every other country in the Christian world,
even to barbarian Muscovy and the hamlets of the boorish Germans,
have its playhouse at the public charge, England will never adventure.
And she will adventure then only because it is her desire to be ever
in the fashion, and to do humbly and dutifully whatso she seeth everybody
else doing. In the meantime you must content yourself as best you
can by the playing of those two pieces which you give out as the most
damnable ever writ, but which your countrymen, I warn you, will swear
are the best you have ever done. But this I will say, that if I could
speak across the ages to our descendants, I should heartily recommend
them to fulfil your wish; for the Scottish minstrel hath well said
that he that maketh the songs of a nation is mightier than he that
maketh its laws; and the same may well be true of plays and interludes.\ 
\textit{{[}The clock chimes the first quarter. The warder returns
on his round{]}.} And now, sir, we are upon the hour when it better
beseems a virgin queen to be abed than to converse alone with the
naughtiest of her subjects. Ho there! Who keeps ward on the queen's
lodgings tonight?

THE WARDER. I do, an't please your majesty.

ELIZABETH. See that you keep it better in future. You have let pass
a most dangerous gallant even to the very door of our royal chamber.
Lead him forth; and bring me word when he is safely locked out; for
I shall scarce dare disrobe until the palace gates are between us.

SHAKESPEAR.\  \textit{{[}kissing her hand{]}} My body goes through
the gate into the darkness, madam; but my thoughts follow you.

ELIZABETH. How! to my bed!

SHAKESPEAR. No, madam, to your prayers, in which I beg you to remember
my theatre.

ELIZABETH. That is my prayer to posterity. Forget not your own to
God; and so goodnight, Master Will.

SHAKESPEAR. Goodnight, great Elizabeth. God save the Queen!

ELIZABETH. Amen.

\textit{\emph{Exeunt}} \textit{severally: she to her chamber: he,
in custody of the warder, to the gate nearest Blackfriars.}

\bigskip{}
\begin{center}\noun{AYOT, ST.\ LAWRENCE,} \textit{\emph{\noun{20th
June}}} \noun{1910.}\end{center}
\end{document}
